Page 17 of Going Home in the Dark

“Thank you,” said Spencer.

“Allow me to say two things more. First, as a realist, I know the world is a hard place. As a stoic, I change whatever I can and accept what I can’t. We all die. It would make no sense for me to grieve for myself, and it makes less than no sense for me to grieve for others. Even in this dark world, life has its rewards, and one goes on seeking them no matter what.”

“Ralph Waldo Hernishen,” Bobby murmured.

Murmuring failed to spare him from rebuke. When Britta was the subject, she could hear the merethoughtof a whispered remark at two hundred yards. The professor turned her attention once more to Bobby. “You are referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reaction to the death of his five-year-old son, which many think cruel and chilling. You are wrong about Emerson and about me, but it does not offend me that you cannot think clearly on this issue and others. Humanity is not in general a clear-thinking species.” She stepped to the bed and looked at her son. “Ernest and I weren’t as close as we could have been if he were more like me, which he would have been if he were wiser. However, although I lamented much about the boy, I accepted who he was—even when he greatly embarrassed me by composing that deplorable shitkicker music that made him famous.” She went to the door and opened it. “The mortician will be here to collect the remains within the hour.” Then she went away to seek those rewards that even this dark world offered.

Still eschewing chairs, the three amigos stood in silence for perhaps a minute before Bobby said, “I guess there’s more than one way to say goodbye.”

Perhaps because Rebecca had been in several movies involving numerous dead bodies and had to concern herself with many problems related to dealing with inconvenient corpses, she was first to recognize the need for urgent action. “Heads up, amigos. We know something weird is going on here.”

“More than one something,” Spencer said, nervously adjusting his porkpie hat.

“Ernie appears to be dead, but he isn’t,” she said.

Bobby shook his head. “Try selling that to the coroner.”

“We can’t let the mortician take the body,” Rebecca declared. “He’ll cut it open, scoop out the organs, and pump what remains full of formaldehyde. Then Ernie will be dead for real.”

12The Busy Body

While Rebecca and Bobby prepared Ernie for relocation to some hidey-hole where no mortician could find him, Spencer went looking for a wheelchair and was soon involved in an argument about hats.

He didn’twantto engage in an argument about hats. Who would? It was just one of those things that happened when two human beings—who were strangers—came together, one fiercely opinionated and the other on an urgent mission that made him impatient with fools.

The distraction would not have occurred if County Memorial had been as thoroughly furnished with wheelchairs as Spencer expected it to be. With the halt, lame, and feeble everywhere in abundance, a hospital ought to belitteredwith wheelchairs. This was especially true now, during the dinner hour, when the patients were in their beds, slurping their meals through straws or choking on pieces of poorly masticated chicken or so drugged and confused that they were struggling to eat Jell-O with their fingers. Later, during visiting hours, you might expect them to be wheeling themselves out of their assigned rooms in an effort to avoid the relatives who had come to chastise them for the bad habits that had landed them here, but not now when there was pudding to eat.

Most people were of the opinion that pudding was one of the few things to enjoy about a stay in the hospital, but Spencer disliked pudding to such an extent that it might accurately be said that he despised it. He preferred thoracic surgery to pudding. The exception was crème brûlée. He loved crème brûlée. Of course, if you were in a fine French restaurant and referred to crème brûlée as “pudding,” you would deserve what you got if the chef showed up at tableside and beat you with a large spatula.

Suddenly hungry but certain that neither County Memorial nor any other hospital in the United States would offer crème brûlée, Spencer considered going to the nurse’s station to inquire about a wheelchair. He restrained himself because he wasn’t able to imagine how to proceed with the conversation if the nurse wanted to know for whom he needed it. He doubted very much that cooperation would be extended to him if he said,The dead man in room 340. He can’t eat dinner, and there’s nothing on TV he wants to watch, so I thought I’d take him for a spin to visit other patients.A better approach eluded him, suggesting that Britta Hernishen had been correct when she insisted that an artist who worked in a visual medium wasn’t likely to be gifted with words.

Consequently, he zigzagged from room to room along both sides of the third-floor main hall, seeking an unoccupied wheelchair that he could commandeer for the purpose of rescuing Ernie from impending embalmment. Just when he was beginning to think they would have to lower their not-dead amigo out of a window with a makeshift rope of bedsheets, he discovered the very conveyance he wanted in room 315.

This was a double room. The patient farther from the door was unconscious and being fed by a drip line, so his gown wasn’tsoiled by food stains and he wasn’t in any condition to object even if someone stole the bed out from under him.

Judging by the available evidence, the patient nearer the door was called “Butch” by his friends. Three colorful helium-filled foil balloons were tied to the headrail of his bed. The first two said,Get Well ButchandLove You Butch. The third featured a red heart and the nameButch.

When Spencer arrived, the upper half of the bed was raised, and Butch was sitting there, staring at the contents of his dinner tray as if he had seen roadkill more appetizing than the meal before him.

Butch was no one’s idea of what a ballet teacher or a flutist in an orchestra ought to look like. His arms were more powerful than those of a bear, though somewhat less hairy. His chest appeared so immense that he could have donated half of it for transplant to a weak-chested man and still been unable to find shirts to fit him. Because his neck was as wide as his shaved skull, his head resembled a mortar round welded to his shoulders. His broad face might have been pleasant if he hadn’t been scowling and if his scowl didn’t conjure in the mind images of medieval executioners in black leather pants and vests, wielding massive axes with razor-sharp blades.

Although the wheelchair was the hospital’s—not the patient’s—property and although a nurse would bring another when requested, Spencer was sufficiently intimidated by Butch’s appearance to ask, “May I borrow this for a minute? Just two minutes, three. A quick little trip for a friend.”

Butch’s scowl of disapproval morphed into an equally intense scowl of puzzlement. Instead of responding to Spencer’s request,he posed a question of his own in a gruff voice. “What’s with the hat?”

Spencer, prince of Dusterheit Galleries, dressed in the same outfit every day, much as the late author Tom Wolfe appeared always in three-piece white suits; therefore, he never gave any thought to what he was wearing. Over the years, the felt hat with the round crown and snap brim had almost become a part of his head. He often forgot it was there. He said, “Hat? Hat? What hat?”

“What hat?” Butch’s scowl of puzzlement tightened into a scowl of impatience. “The hat on your head. I’ve never seen a stupid hat like that except one time on a freak in a movie.”

Judging by Butch’s irritability and his demanding tone, Spencer decided the man was accustomed to having authority over others and to being obeyed.

You might expect Spencer Truedove to explain politely that he was a famous artist, that these days famous artists and writers and musicians were often encouraged to regard their wardrobe as a part of their branding strategy. But he did not choose to explain. For a moment, he forgot the wheelchair and went into defense mode.

Infrequently but usually at inconvenient moments, Spencer was annoyed far in excess of the vexation that other people might feel at being the target of a thoughtless remark. If we were to engage in the flood of Freudian babble that washes through many modern novels, we might be subjected to twenty-four pages of scenes recalling how Spencer’s mother went off in search of the free-spirited self she had lost elsewhere in life and how the more ignorant teenagers of Maple Grove tormented the boy. If we were to probe deep, deep into Spencer’s psyche, we would learn thatone of the chants with which they afflicted him was this:Spencer Truedove is unique. His mommy left, his daddy, too. Hey, what a freak! What a freak!With that discovery, we would realize that Butch’s use of the word “freak” triggered Spencer’s response and his unfortunate delay in acquiring the wheelchair. By dispensing with Freudian babble, we have learned in one paragraph what otherwise would have taken twenty-four pages, which is reason for both the author and reader to be grateful.

“It’s not a stupid hat,” Spencer retorted. “It’s maybe the coolest hat ever. It’s cooler than a damn Stetson.”

Perhaps it was Spencer’s intensity that caused Butch to realize his own tone of voice was on the surly side and that his dismay at the inadequacy of his dinner might have motivated him to lash out in a most improper fashion. He said, “Hey, pal, it’s just a hat.”

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