people into friends by making them presents of things she stole.
And the woman behind the counter told him bitterly that she was just an ordinary housewife, who had volunteered to help at the hospital, and that she hadn’t been to sleep for twenty-four hours. It was late afternoon by then.
I realized that I knew who she was, too—not approximately, but exactly. Twenty-four hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, an idealized representative of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere. She denied that she was a nurse, but she was a nurse anyway, without vanity or guile.
I have a tendency, anyway, to swoon secretly in the presence of nurturing women, since my own mother was such a cold and aggressively helpless old bat.
Who was this profoundly beautiful and unselfish woman behind the counter? What a surprise! This was Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, the wife of the Pontiac dealer—once believed to be the dumbest girl in high school. I wanted Felix to get a look at her, but I could not spot him anywhere. The last time he had seen her, she had been cutting through a vacant lot in the nighttime, way back in 1943.
• • •
She was a robot in back of the counter. Her memory was blasted by weariness. I asked her if Mr. and Mrs. Otto Waltz were in the hospital, and she looked in a card file. She told me mechanically that Otto Waltz was in intensive care, in critical condition, and could not have visitors, and that Emma Wetzel Waltz was not in serious condition, and had been given a bed in a makeshift ward which had been set up in the basement.
So there was a member of our distinguished family down in a basement again.
I had never been in the basement of the hospital before. But I had known this much about it even when I was a little boy: That was where they had the city morgue.
That had been the first stop for Eloise Metzger, after I shot her between the eyes.
• • •
I found Felix standing in a corner of the lobby, agog at the crowd. He hadn’t done anything to try and find Mother and Father. He was useless. “Help me, Rudy,” he said, “—I’m seventeen years old again.” It was true.
“Somebody just called me the ‘Velvet Fog,’ ” he marveled. This was the sobriquet of a famous singer of popular music named Mel Tormé. Felix had also been nicknamed that in high school.
“Whoever called me that,” he said, “said it sneeringly, as though I should be ashamed of myself. It was a real fat guy, with cold blue eyes. A grown man in a business suit. Nobody’s spoken to me like that since the Army took me away from here.”
It was easy for me to guess who he was talking about. It had to be Jerry Mitchell, who had been Felix’s worst enemy in high school. “Jerry Mitchell,” I said.
“That was Jerry?” said Felix. “He’s so heavy. He’s lost so much hair!”
“Not only that,” I said, “but he’s a doctor now.”
“I pity his patients,” said Felix. “He used to torture cats and dogs, and say he was performing scientific experiments.”
And there was prophecy in that. Dr. Mitchell was building a big practice on the principle that nobody in modern times should ever be the least uncomfortable or dissatisfied, since there were now pills for everything. And he would buy himself a great big house out in Fairchild Heights, right next door to Dwayne and Celia Hoover, and he would encourage Celia and his own wife, and God only knows who all else, to destroy their minds and spirits with amphetamine.
About that insect swarm around my head, all those bits of information I had on this person and that one: Dr. Jerome Mitchell was married to the former Barbara Squires, the younger sister of Anthony Squires. Anthony Squires was the policeman who had given me the nickname Deadeye Dick.
• • •
Father’s deathbed scene went like this: Mother and Felix and I were there, right by his bed. Gino and Marco Marítimo, faithful to the end, had driven to the hospital atop their own bulldozer. It would later turn out that these two endearing old poops had done hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage on the way, tearing up hidden automobiles and fences and fire hydrants and mailboxes, and so on. They had to stay out in the corridor, since they weren’t blood relatives.
Father was under an