Dear Old Dead(16)

Ida checked her instruments for the third time. Then she admitted that there was no further excuse for standing where she was. She went through the swinging fire doors to the hall and wove among the stretchers to where Martha was standing. Half an hour ago, this hall was fall of people. Now there were only a nurse and a cleaning woman, both heading someplace else. All the action for the rest of the night was going to be in Admitting or in OR.

Martha was leaning against the far wall, looking tense. Martha always looked tense. Ida thought of tension as Martha’s occupation.

“Why do you always take so long to do everything?” Martha demanded, when Ida was close enough to hear. “You’re always puttering around at something. It’s maddening.”

“I had work to do. Now it’s done.”

“That’s nice. Victor is here, in case you didn’t know. You might not remember, but we had an appointment to have dinner and talk about the will.”

“Oh, I remember. I just can’t believe he came. Doesn’t he listen to the news?”

“No.”

“I suppose he doesn’t.” Ida was wearing surgical gloves. No one was allowed to handle sterile instruments except in surgical gloves. Ida peeled these off and dropped them in the nearest waste container. It was a red waste container, which was silly—the gloves hadn’t been near any blood or feces, just handling steel in a perfectly clean instruments’ room—but she didn’t feel like walking across the hall again to throw them in a white one. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.

“What about you?” she asked Martha. “What are you doing down here? Don’t you have work in the other building?”

“Nobody’s doing anything in the other building. We’re just sitting around staring at each other and saying what a shame it is. I don’t know if it is a shame.”

“I don’t think of things in terms like that. Where’s Victor?”

“Still down in the cafeteria. I couldn’t stand him any more. He was going on and on. What’s wrong with Victor, anyway? We have to get something done and he just… dithers.”

“Maybe he doesn’t care about the money,” Ida said. “I don’t care about the money. Not very much.”

“We all care about the money,” Martha said sharply. “No matter what we say. And we all care about Rosalie. Have you seen her lately?”

“I saw her down at the bank last week. I was coming in and she was going out. She looked the way she always looks, Martha.”

“She looks like the daughter of Dracula,” Martha said firmly. “That getup she’s always wearing these days. What does she think she’s trying to do, audition for a beatnik movie?”

“I suppose she thinks she looks good that way. She does. Rosalie is very pretty.”

“Victor thinks she’s pretty, too. Pretty. It makes me want to spit. She looks like a cat with poisonous claws.”

“There are no cats with poisonous claws.”

“Maybe Rosalie will invent one. Maybe when she gets all our money, she’ll open a genetic engineering lab and concoct all kinds of creatures for herself. Like koala bears that kill on command.”

“Would you feel this way if Rosalie weren’t getting all our money?”

“But she is getting all our money, isn’t she? Or she will if we don’t find some way to stop her.”

“It’s not our money anyway,” Ida said. “It’s Grandfather’s. He made it.”

“Did he? Maybe he stole it from the Indians. Maybe he conjured it up out of a cauldron he keeps in his basement and feeds the flesh of virgins to. I think this whole family is foul, Ida, honestly. I really do.”

Ida was tempted to say that if the whole family was foul, then Martha herself was foul. The drawback to that was that Martha might agree to it. Ida was not subject to guilt, liberal or otherwise. Her grandfather’s money and her own trust funds seemed to her to be as much matters of chance—and as neutral in terms of morality—as the strange shape of her body and the plainness of her face. Martha felt differently, as Ida had good reason to know.

“If Victor is down in the cafeteria, maybe we should go join him,” Ida said. “God only knows I’m hungry, and I don’t have anything I have to do for the next half second. They can always page me if they want me.”

“They want you too much. You should stick up for yourself.”

“There are people dying all over the building, Martha. Myself can wait until all that’s under control.”

Ida went down to the end of the corridor and opened the set of fire doors there. Martha passed ahead of her and Ida let her go. The cafeteria was just at the bottom of this flight of stairs. Ida could smell the cardboard food and hear the clink of silverware and the hum of voices. The hum was low, meaning that the television was tuned to something most people wanted to hear. Ida was sure it was press reports of the shoot-out. There wouldn’t be too much in the way of press reports. The New York City press treated gang wars in Harlem on about the level it treated a bunion   on the mayor’s toe.