Speedboat by RENATA ADLER Read Free Book Online Page B

even the lettuce, had taken his showers in that tub, over what was going to be half of dinner. They could not get over this. They thought of selling their boat again and returning to Geneva. The jet, the telephone, the boat, the train, the television. Dislocations.
    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