Renata Adler - Speedboat

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

My new life has its contrasts. One weekend, I was sent to cover a hospital in Brooklyn — municipal, enormous, patients mostly black. My subject was the emergency ward on weekends, but a middle-aged black doctor, graduate of Howard in the thirties, took me on a tour. The wards were jammed — diseases, fractures, burns. The severely burned had a little ward room of their own because they so depress the other patients. Wounded criminal suspects had semiprivate rooms with police outside them. These were luxury accommodations. All patients — even those about to “slip away,” in the doctor’s euphemism — were silent, except one white lady who screamed occasionally from senile psychosis. It was as though the entire place were drugged.

One lady patient, very ill, had been put in the corridor, her bed alongside the wall, blocking the water cooler. Every intern and nurse, rushing harassed and anxious down that hall, would absent-mindedly pull the bed aside along its casters, take a drink of water, slam the bed against the wall again. All else was silent. I thought I’d had my tour when the doctor, returning to his office, noticed a silhouette through his glass-paneled door. “Oh,” he said. “This will interest you. You mustn’t miss this.” Then he told the young black man waiting in the office that his sister was about to slip away. We went down the ward to see the sister. I was introduced and said, “How are you?” She said, “Fine thanks. How are you?”

Toward early morning, activity in the emergency ward accelerated, a catastrophe a minute, mostly victims of knife fights whom other hospitals — uneasy with police cases — had simply passed along. Two interns were Hungarian refugees who had had full practices in Budapest, two were young Egyptians, all were gray with tiredness. A case arrived upon a stretcher. Two policemen asked routinely who had cut him. He said he did not know. Two hours later, still waiting for an operating room for him to become empty, the cut man’s wife saw a young man enter at the far end of the room. She said quite softly to an intern, “That’s him. That’s the man that did it.” The intern called a policeman.

The wife told of her husband’s being held against a tub in the hall bathroom of their building and cut, for reasons she could not explain. The young man himself had come in to have a knife wound on his right palm treated. When confronted with the story, and the evidence of his own wounded hand, the accused young man denied it. The police brought him to the man upon the stretcher. He leaned solicitously over the weak man and said, “I didn’t do it, did I? Tell them.” The weak man looked up and said, “Yeah, man. You did. You cut me.” Then he shut his eyes. They wheeled him to the operating room to fix him up.

I am not technically a Catholic. That is, I have not informed or asked the Church. I do not, certainly, believe in evolution. For example, fossils. I believe there are objects in nature — namely, fossils — which occur in layers, and which some half-rational fantasts insist derive from animals, the bottom ones more ancient than the top. The same, I think, with word derivations — arguments straining back to Sanskrit or Indo-European. I have never seen a word derive. It seems to me that there are given things, all strewn and simultaneous. Even footprints, except in detective stories, now leave me in some doubt that anyone passed by. People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more. At table, there are often one or two people who stammer. The well-bred stammer that pretends the speaker is not quite firm in what he’s stated, is still open to suggestion — open mind. And the real stammer that bears down so hard on language that it seems absolute, a way to occupy airwaves, until the speaker has quite formulated his transmission. I have noticed that stammerers talk a lot. The chaplain, though, who was the best interpreter in the history of the monastery at the border, had a violent speech disorder in his native tongue.

We had been standing outside his tent for eleven hours. The crowd was large. When at last he came out, the guru stared, then threw an orange, savagely. He returned to his tent. That was all.

The other night, I interviewed a controversial diplomat, an ex- and future politician with strong ideas on air pollution. He took me home. By the time I had answered the telephone ringing in my bedroom, he had started an enormous fire in the fireplace of my living room. I only have two rooms, kitchen, and bath. He had taken off his jacket, fixed himself and me a drink, and sat upon the sofa. He was so good at all this that for the first time in months I felt at home. For an hour and a half, I did not tell him that I had a deadline. By that time, the fire was blazing firmly and correctly. The diplomat had been a country boy. When I finally did mention my deadline at the office, he looked surprised, then said good-naturedly the brownstone would catch fire if we left the fireplace in flames. It was quite true. I asked him how to put it out. He said, “Sand, baby.” I have no sand in my apartment. We poured water from every pan and kettle in the kitchen. It took some time. We also drenched the carpet. When I woke up at noon the next day, the wet wood and ashes with a kettle still beside them looked like some desolate form of art.

In Paris, where I studied anthropology (the structural, not field work), some American anthropologists on Fulbrights gave a party for some Africans, in my apartment. The Africans were all students at the École Normale Superieure. They might one day all be prime ministers. A student from the Ivory Coast said he had as many names as the midwife could reel off in the moments when he was actually being born. The daughter of a former British high commissioner in Nigeria danced the high life with a student from the Belgian Congo. A small, blond French-Canadian girl left the party early, to go to bed with one of the Americans. She asked him later when they would see each other again. He said, “Don’t break the magic.” Afterward, he left for Mali. Most people left the party very late. It was a year when it was rumored that Life was going to do an article on American expatriates in Paris. Perhaps there is that rumor every year or two. In any case, the Americans stopped washing their hair, wrote poetry, and were seen much in cafes, complaining of publicity. At the party, though, they stayed so long I left and took a room in a hotel.

The doctor we all loved in high school set fractures at the foot of the ski slope. He also worked part-time at the prison. Except for a spectacular, unsolved murder in the forties, committed by someone we all knew, the prison is the thing for which our town is known. It used to be known for its Main Street — which was an infuriating obstacle to traffic between New York and Boston. But now there is a highway. The prison is important. We have had every major federal offender anyone can remember — corrupt, embezzling politicians while they were being re-elected, conscientious objectors, all sorts of federal offenders, radical clergy, spies. The prison baseball team plays with teams from the local stores and factories. On sports pages, the prison line-ups differ from those of local teams only by the omission of last names. Tom J., from the prison, for example, pitched, and so on. Anyway, the doctor we all loved in high school went on from setting fractures to a flirtation with homeopathy. He could not bear suffering. When patients called to say they had colds, he would whistle and say God, I can hear it. When they had sprained ankles, he would inhale and say that he knew how it hurt, he had had sprains himself. Homeopathy failed him. He became a great internist, orthodox, modern. Then, he went to Tennessee, and found himself faced with victims of hexes. They were in comas. They seemed to be dying. He tried orthodox medicine. They got worse. He got angry. Then he gave in. He started circling their beds three times, with lighted candles. That was the accepted practice in the region, and it worked.