Fallt's Bubbli nunner!
In soft sweeps the rain patters on the skylight. Music leaks through the walls from the party. The noise of her fall must have been huge, for the yellow oak door pops open at once and people thunder all around, but the only sound Nelson heard was a squeak Pru gave when she first hit like one of those plastic floating bath toys suddenly accidentally stepped on.
Soupy is in fine form at the hospital, kidding the nurses and staff and moving through this white world in his black clothes like a happy germ, an exception to all the rules. He comes forward as if to embrace Ma Springer but at the last second holds back and gives her instead a somewhat jaunty swat on the shoulder. To Janice and Harry he gives his mischievous small-toothed grin; to Nelson he turns a graver, but still bright-eyed, face. "She looks just dandy, except for the cast on her arm. Even there she was fortunate. It's the left arm."
"She's left-handed," Nelson tells him. The boy is grouchy and stoops with lack of sleep. He was with her at the hospital from one to three and now at nine-thirty is back again. He called the house around one-fifteen and nobody answered and that has been added to his twenty years of grievances. Mom-mom had been in the house but had been too old and dopey to hear the phone through her dreams and his parents had been out with the Murketts and Harrisons at the new strip joint along Route 422 beyond the Four Seasons toward Pottstown and then had gone back to the Murketts' for a nightcap. So the family didn't hear the news until Nelson, who had crawled into his empty bed at three-thirty, awoke at nine. On the ride over to the hospital in his mother's Mustang he claimed he hadn't fallen asleep until the birds began to chirp.
"What birds?" Harry said. "They've all gone south."
"Dad, don't bug me, there are these black sort of birds right outside the window."
"Starlings," Janice offered, peacemaking.
"They don't chirp, they scrawk," Harry insisted. "Scrawk, scrawk."
"Doesn't it stay dark late now?" Ma Springer interposed. It's aging her, this constant tension between her son-in-law and her grandson.
Nelson sitting there all red-eyed and snuffly and stinking of last night's vapors did annoy Harry, short of sleep and hungover himself. He fought down the impulse to say Scrawk again. At the hospital, he asks Soupy, "How'd you get here so soon?" genuinely admiring. Snicker all you want, the guy is magical somehow.
"The lady herself," the clergyman gaily announces, doing a little side-step that knocks a magazine to the floor from a low table where too many are stacked. Woman's Day. Field and Stream. A hospital of course wouldn't get Consumer Reports. A killing article in there a while ago about medical costs and the fantastic mark-up on things like aspirin and cold pills. Soupy stoops to retrieve the magazine and comes up slightly breathless. He tells them, "Evidently, after they calmed the dear girl down and set her arm and reassured her that the fetus appeared unaffected she still felt such concern that she woke up at seven a.m. and knew Nelson would be asleep and didn't know who to call. So she thought of me." Soupy beams. "I of course was still wrapped in the arms of Morpheus but got my act together and told her I'd rush over between Holy Communion and the ten o'clock service and, behold, here I am. Ecce homo. She wanted to pray with me to keep the baby, she'd been praying constantly, and at least to this point in time as they used to say it seems to have worked!" His black eyes click from one to another face, up and down and across. "The doctor who received her went off duty at eight but the nurse in attendance solemnly swore to me that for all of the mother's bruises that little heartbeat in there is just as strong as ever, and no signs of vaginal bleeding or anything nasty like that. That Mother Nature, she is one tough old turkey." He has chosen Ma Springer to tell this to. "Now I must run, or the hungry sheep will look up and be not fed. Visiting hours here don't really begin until one p.m., but I'm sure the authorities wouldn't object if you took a quick peek. Tell them I gave you my blessing." And his hand reflexively lifts, as if to give them a blessing. But instead he lays the hand on the sleeve of Ma Springer's glistening fur coat. "If you can't make the service," he entreats, "do come for the meeting afterwards. It's the meeting to advise the vestry on the new tracker organ, and a lot of pennypinchers are coming out of the woods. They put a dollar a week into the plate all year, and their vote is as good as mine or thine." He flies away, scattering the V-for-peace sign down the hall.
Boy, these boys do love misery, Harry thinks. Well, it's a turf nobody else wants. St. Joseph's Hospital is in the tatty northcentral part of Brewer where the old Y.M.C.A. was before they tore it down for yet another drive-in bank and where the old wooden railroad bridge has been rebuilt in concrete that started to crack immediately. They used to talk about burying the tracks along through here in a tunnel but then the trains pretty much stopped running and that solved that. Janice had had Rebecca June here when the nurses were all nuns, they may still be nuns but now there's no way of telling. The receptionist for this floor wears a salmon-colored pants suit. Her swollen bottom and slumping shoulders lead the way. Half-open doors reveal people lying emaciated under white sheets staring at the white ceiling, ghosts already. Pru is in a four-bed room and two women in gauzy hospital johnnies scatter back into their beds, ambushed by early visitors. In the fourth bed an ancient black woman sleeps. Pru herself is all but asleep. She still wears flecks of last night's mascara but the rest of her looks virginal, especially the fresh white cast from elbow to wrist. Nelson kisses her lightly on the lips and then, sitting in the one bedside chair while his elders stand, sockets his face in the space on the bed edge next to the curve of Pru's hip. What a baby, Harry thinks.
"Nelson was wonderful," Pru is telling them. "So caring." Her voice is more musical and throaty than Harry has ever heard it.
He wonders if just lying down does that to a woman: changes the angle of her voice box.
"Yeah, he felt sick about it," Harry says. "We didn't hear the story till this morning."
Nelson lifts his head. "They were at a strip joint, can you imagine?"
"Jesus," Harry says to Janice. "Who's in charge here? What does he want us to do, sit around the house all the time aging gracefully?"
Ma Springer says, "Now we can only stay a minute, I want to get to church. It wouldn't look right I think just to go to the meeting like Reverend Campbell said."
"Go to that meeting, Ma," Harry points out, "they'll hit you up for a fortune. Tracker organs don't grow on trees."
Janice says to Pru, "You poor sweetie. How bad is the arm?"
"Oh, I wasn't paying that much attention to what the doctor said." Her voice floats, she must be full of tranquilizers. "There's a bone on the outside, with a funny name -"
"Femur," Harry suggests. Something about all this has jazzed him up, made him feel nerved-up and defiant. Those strippers last night, some of them young enough to be his daughter. The Gold Cherry, the place was called.
Nelson lifts his head again from burrowing in Pru's side. "That's in the thigh, Dad. She means the humerus."
"Ha ha," Harry says.
Pru seems to moan. "Ulna," she supplies. "He said it was just a simple fracture."
"How long's it gonna be on?" Harry asks.
"He said six weeks if I do what he says."
"Off by Christmas," Harry says. Christmas is a big thing in his mind this year, for beyond it, and the mop-up of New Year's, they're going to take their trip, they have the hotel, the plane reservations, they were discussing it all last night again, after the excitement of the strippers.
"You poor sweetie," Janice repeats.
Pru begins to sing, without music. But the words come out as if sung. "Oh my God, I don't mind, I'm glad for it, I deserve to be punished somehow. I honestly believe" – she keeps looking straight at Janice, with an authority they haven't seen from her before – "it's God telling me this is the price He asks for my not losing the baby. I'm glad to pay it, I'd be glad if every bone in my body was broken, I really wouldn't care. Oh my God, when I felt my feet weren't under me and I knew there wasn't anything for me to do but fall down those horrible stairs, the thoughts that ran through my head! You must know."