Unknown - The Genius

“What about strawberry,” I offered.

“Does that sound like an adequate substitute?” he asked.

“Well—”

“How bout some hair pie,” he asked the waitress. She looked at him, looked at me, shook her head, and walked away.

“Whatever happened to service,” Joe shouted at her. He looked at me. “I’ll have a brownie sundae.”

I got up and went after the waitress.

Joe stared sullenly at the tabletop until his dessert came. When it did, he didn’t touch it. He said, “Victor was in the nuthouse, too.”

“With you?”

“No.” He snickered. “You never met him, huh?”

“No.”

“He’s a lot older than me. We didn’t meet until he started coming to the club.”

“And when was that.”

“Right after I started advertising the tourney. So, 83. I used to make fliers and stick em up on telephone poles. He shows up, one of the fliers in his hand, like it was his ticket. I remember that night, there were only three of us, me, Victor, and Raul, who kicked it in a couple of years back. He and I played all the time cause nobody else showed on a regular basis. I knew Victor was decent cause he clobbered Raul.”

“Did he beat you?” I asked.

He began shoveling in the ice cream. “I said he was good.”

I apologized.

“I don’t care. But if you’re trying to get the facts, then that’s the fucking facts.”

“Did he ever mention where he was institutionalized?”

“Someplace upstate.”

“Did he mention the name?”

“That’s privileged information,” he said.

He didn’t say anything more until he’d finished his sundae, scraping his spoon along the inside of the bowl to gather the last threads of chocolate sauce. Then he grunted and took a deep breath and said, “The New York School for Training and Rehabilitation. That’s what it’s called.”

I wrote it down.

“It’s near Albany,” he added.

“Thank you.”

He nodded, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on the floor as the waitress passed. She hissed at him and he blew her a kiss. Then he sighed and said, “Pardon me while I drain the main vein.”

I paid the check and sat waiting for him to return. He never did. He went out the back door, and by the time I figured it out, his footprints were already filling up.

Bertha lies on the top floor of a private hospital on the east side of Manhattan. Well-wishers have filled her room with bouquets, but as she prefers the dark, the nurses have left the shades drawn and the flowers have all begun to die, producing a cloying stench that gets into one’s clothes. Nevertheless she will not consent to have the vases removed. She is impervious; she has tubes up her nose; and the comfort that the flowers provide means more to her than the momentary comfort of her visitors. Visitors come and go, but she is stuck; and if the room smells like a compost pile, that’s nobody business but hers. Who are these visitors, that they should have an opinion? Not her friends. Not the committees and boards of directors who have sent the flowers. Those people are not allowed in. She does not want to be seen in a state of decay. Only with the greatest of reluctance did she agree to come to the hospital in the first place. She wanted to stay at the house on Fifth. David prevailed upon her: she could not remain at home; she would die if she did not get proper care, in a proper setting. And what, exactly, was wrong with that? Louis had died at home. But David argued that if she went to the hospital she might live longer, and wasn’t that the idea? To stay alive—to clutch at life—to dig fingernails into its greasy surface?

Lying here, she isn’t so sure.

Hospital or no hospital, she’s dying all the same. Her body is a city and the tumors that riddle it little insulting middle-class suburban outposts of disease, springing up overnight in her liver, her lungs, her stomach, her spleen, her spine. They have tried one treatment; they have tried another. Nothing helps. Better to go in a favorite bed, with a favorite view, surrounded by people she has known and trusted. Not these men with clipboards. Not these women with needles and white hats. Not lost in an artificial jungle of sympathy. Where is her son? He brought her here. Where is he, that son of hers? She calls his name.

“Yes, Mother.”

“I want to go home.”

She cannot see his reaction—he sits slightly behind her, where he knows she cannot turn to see him—but she knows what he’s doing: tugging on his earlobes. His father did the same thing.

“You can’t go home, Mother.”

“I can and I will.”

He says nothing.

“David.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“If the child is a girl I don’t want you to name her for me. That’s morbid.”

“It’s a boy, Mother. We’re going to name him Lawrence. You already know that.”

“I know nothing of the sort. What kind of a name is Lawrence?”

He sighs. “We’ve talked about this already.”

“When.”

“Several times.”

“When.”

“Weeks ago. Several times. In fact, you asked me the day before yesterday.”

“I asked no such thing.”

He says nothing.

“When are the children coming to visit.”

“They were here, Mother.”

“When.”

He says nothing.

“When were they here,” she says, afraid to hear the answer.

“Yesterday,” he says.

“That’s a lie.” She grips the bedsheets, terrified. Why is it that she can remember events and faces and stories and whole conversations from thirty years ago—and yet she cannot remember her grandchildren, yesterday? That shouldn’t be possible. Her memory is impressionistic; the closer she gets, the less she can resolve. Her nose to the canvas and all she gets are dots and smudges. And her mind has worse tricks than that up its sleeve, much worse. Old memories keep springing up where they do not belong; at times she calls David by his father’s name. She overhears David and the doctor discussing the president, and she expresses her opinion about Roosevelt and the two men look at her and David says, “It’s Kennedy, Mother.” The doctor is a young Jew named Waldenberg or Waldenstein or Steinbergwald or Bergswaldstein. He is bald and joyless and she doesn’t trust him. She asks David for Dr. Fetchett and is informed that he has been dead since 1957. That is nonsense; Fetchett has been in the room. He comes in daily to take her temperature. He stands at the foot of her bed, commiserating. Dear Bertha, you look so pale. Would you like a glass of whiskey? A kind of second sight has taken hold of her; before her illness, she never would have been able to see him so clearly. The forehead filigreed with blue veins and the enormous pores and moist nostrils, like a cow’s. Not a handsome man, Dr. Fetchett … And yet she sees the wilting flowers and cannot remember who sent them; demands over and over to know why she cannot go home.

Worse than the loosening of her mind still is her awareness of that loosening. She had expected that one of senility’s few comforts would be its self-negation; she might be confused, but she wouldn’t know she was confused. But she sees how people talk to her. They use soothing tones meant for animals and children. They push food upon her. They ask her to sign documents relinquishing her authority. They coax and wheedle and she sends them away. They don’t have her best interests in mind. She won’t deal with them, not as long as they continue to patronize her. Still they come, these lawyers with their pens and notaries and contracts and wills and lawsuits and mortgages. She refers them to David and still they come.

They are crafty. They wait for him to leave and then they sneak in. It’s enough to drive a lesser woman up the wall.