Russell Banks - Trailerpark

THE REAL ESTATE MAN HAROLD DAME was dying. Doctor Wickshaw gave him one month to six, and when he explained what few remaining services there were available for the real estate man, whether they kept him in the hospital or put him in a nursing home, and the costs of those services, the real estate man’s son and daughter-in-law, who had been running the business alone for nearly a year anyhow, decided to bring him home, to install him in his bedroom on the second floor and to hire a nurse to take care of him for the one month to six he had left. She could administer the drugs he required, she could clean and feed him and take care of his bedding, she could watch after his dying, and when he was dead, she could leave.

Decisions like this are hard, the son of the real estate man explained to his wife, who had reservations about having the old man in the house for one to six months, a living corpse, practically (though out of respect for her husband’s feelings she did not exactly put it that way), a total invalid drugged against pain, helpless and dependent as a newborn infant and daily becoming more so, shrinking into himself, unable to speak coherently or even to recognize who was in the room — it probably meant they wouldn’t be able to go to Florida for the month of January the way they’d planned.

Nonsense, the husband assured her, unless of course the old man happened to die during that particular month, in which case there would be the funeral to take care of, but they could fly back for that, if necessary. All they had to do was be sure that the nurse they hired was honest, competent and pleasant to be around, for after all, they themselves would have to be around her for one to six months, not counting the month of January, when they would be in Florida. The wife wondered if the nurse would have to eat with them. Of course not. She could take the room next to the old man’s, and she could eat there. The son and daughter-in-law would continue living downstairs in their wing of the house, where they had lived ever since the son had been brought into the business, and they would practically never see the woman.

There are several ways to go about hiring a private nurse to provide this kind of care, but when you live in a small town in a rural state like New Hampshire, probably the easiest way is to let your physician take care of it. Harold Dame’s son and daughter-in-law were busy people, especially with the old man so sick and for the last year unable to run the business the way he used to, so they had explained at great length to Doctor Wickshaw, an intelligent and tactful man, precisely what kind of woman they were looking for, and he had proceeded to find them just such a woman.

Doctor Wickshaw was what you might call an artistic man, in that he was the president of the Catamount Drama Club, the coordinator for the annual Suncook Valley Arts Festival, and owned a large collection of works by contemporary New Hampshire painters and sculptors. His wife was a potter and wore smocks and sandals and large gold hoops in her pierced ears. He had a white Vandyke beard, a rosy complexion, and the kind of round belly on a slender body that a man who enjoys exotic food and interesting wine often wears. He was good-natured, affluent (for he had been the only physician in town for over twenty-five years and had invested heavily and wisely in real estate), and somewhat eccentric. In the summer months he frequently wore Bermuda shorts and shortsleeved shirts to the office.

For over a year, he had been looking for a nurse who could double as a receptionist, and he had interviewed and rejected every local person even remotely qualified for the job and then had advertised in Concord, twenty-five miles away, and after interviewing and rejecting the few applicants who had come out from Concord, he had nearly given up the search. Very few people who have qualifications for such specialized work as nursing are willing to live in a small mill town like Catamount, a town that has been dying for a half-century, a town where the poor are not only always with you but where annually they seem to increase in geometric proportion to the rich. The old buildings, designed and constructed when labor was cheap and materials plentiful, grow older and shabbier and eventually fall, to be replaced by asphalt lots or else by corrugated iron, sheet metal and plastic structures whose function, regardless of the name of the building or the owner, seems to be strictly that of temporary storage. It occurred to Doctor Wickshaw, however, that if somehow a nurse could be lured to this town and could be made to stay for several seasons, she would discover, as he himself had discovered years ago, that it offered numerous advantages and pleasures not obtainable in the cities and attractive suburbs to the south. There was the beauty of the landscape, the lakes and forests, the rivers and mountains, the flowers and wildlife; there was the comfort of living among people whose names and family histories you knew, people who would come to your aid when you needed it and who would leave you alone when you desired it; there was the security of living in a community that still honored the old-fashioned virtues of thrift, honesty, independence and respect for the independence of one’s neighbors, love of God, love of country, and love of family.

“There has got to be someone left in the world who has a decent education and still cares for this kind of life,” the doctor told his wife.

She agreed, but all she’d seen lately of people with educations and options who happened to opt for living “up here among the savages,” as she put it, were hippies and real estate developers. Everyone else, she reminded him, if it’s possible, leaves.

“We haven’t left,” Doctor Wickshaw proudly announced.

“No,” she said. “We haven’t.”

Along about the time the doctor no longer felt able to hold this type of conversation with his wife — due to his failure to find a nurse willing to come out here to Catamount and work for little more than half of what she could make in Concord or down in Manchester, New Hampshire — the son and daughter-in-law of Harold Dame, the real estate man, had come to him and asked him to locate and hire for them a private nurse for the old man’s final one to six months. They were willing to pay whatever it cost — for they already knew how much it would cost to keep the old man in the hospital or in a nursing home, and there wasn’t a private nurse in the world who would charge them that much.

The doctor pondered a moment and informed them that he probably could get someone to come out of Boston, thanks to certain collegial connections he maintained there, and if they wished, he would do all the interviewing and hiring himself, for after all, who knew the medical and personal needs of Harold Dame better than he, Sam Wickshaw, his personal physician and his old friend and hunting companion of days gone by?

The son and daughter-in-law were relieved and went quickly on to their scheduled meeting with a surveyor out at Suncook Pond. The doctor picked up his phone and dialed Doctor Furman Bisher in Brookline, Massachusetts, a heart specialist with a summer home on Lake Winnepesaukee, and that is how Harold Dame, the real estate man, came to be cared for in his dying months by Carol Constant, a twenty-eight-year-old, recently divorced black woman from West Roxbury, Massachusetts, an unemployed nurse trying to return to the profession she had left three years ago to marry a man and care for his sick and aged mother. The mother had died, the man had gone to New York with a girl who wrote for TV, and Carol, after filing for divorce, had started looking for work. One of the physicians who had interviewed her, since many of his patients were black professional people and he was therefore in the market for a black nurse, was Doctor Furman Bisher. He had declined to hire her because Carol was not, to his eyes, an especially pretty woman. She was extremely dark, with a broad flat nose and liquid brown eyes. Her hair she kept cropped close to her head, almost like a skullcap. Also, she was a large woman, well muscled and tall, almost masculine, a little frightening to a man like Doctor Furman Bisher. But he had admired her obvious intelligence, and her credentials were impeccable, and she seemed to be an extremely pleasant woman, good-natured and kind, so he had not hesitated to recommend her to his New Hampshire colleague. “She’s a black woman,” he warned Doctor Wickshaw, “but she’s sensible. She needs a long-term private job like this to build up her file, which frankly was a little thin for me to take her on here. But she ought to be perfect for your needs up there in the boondocks,” he joked.