G Is For Gumshoe

Ahh. I felt myself nodding. Her Medi-Cal benefits were ru

She and her assistant exchanged a quick look.

"Is there a problem with that?"

"Well, no," she said. Her gaze shifted to the doorway. "Here's Mrs. Renquist, the ward supervisor. I think she's the person you should properly discuss this with."

We went through another round of introductions and explanations. Mrs. Renquist was perhaps forty-five, thin and ta

5

I heard agnes grey before I ever laid eyes on her. Mrs. Renquist and I had climbed the wide curving stairs to the second floor. We proceeded down the upper hallway without saying much. The character of the grade school was still oddly evident, in spite of the fact that extensive remodeling had been done to accommodate current use. The former classrooms had been quite large, with wide, multipaned windows stretching almost ceiling to floor. Light streamed in through glass embedded with chicken wire. The woodwork had been left in its original state, varnished oak aged to a glossy russet shade. Up here, the worn wood floors had been covered with mottled white vinyl tiles and the once spacious rooms had been partitioned into cubicles, containing two beds each. The walls were painted in shades of pale green and blue. The place was clean, if impersonal, the air perfumed with ultimate body functions gone sour. Old people were visible everywhere, in beds, in wheelchairs, on gurneys, huddled on hard wooden benches in the wide corridor; idle, insulated from their surroundings by senses that had shut down over the years. They seemed as motionless as plants, resigned to infrequent watering. Anyone would wither under such a regimen: no exercise, no air, no sunlight. They had outlived not only friends and family, but most illnesses, so that at eighty and ninety, they seemed untouchable, singled out to endure, without relief, a life that stretched into yawning eternity.

We passed a crafts room where six women sat around a table, making potholders out of nylon loops woven on red metal frames. Their efforts were as misshapen as mine had been when I was five. I never liked doing that shit the first tune around and I didn't look forward to having to do it again at the end of my days. Maybe I'd get lucky and be struck down by a beer truck before I was forced into such ignominy.

The recreation room was evidently just ahead, as I'd picked up the blast of a television set turned up loud enough for failing ears, a PBS documentary by the sound of it. The banging and shrieking suggested tribal rites somewhere in a culture not given to quietude. We turned left into a six-bed ward where a series of curtains were all that separated one patient from the next. At the far end of the room, like the origins of the Nile, I could see the source of the uproar. It wasn't a television set at all. Without even asking, I knew this was Agnes. She was stark naked, dancing a dirty boogie on the bed while she accompanied herself by banging on a bedpan with a spoon. She was tall and thin, bald everyplace except her bony head, which was enveloped in an aureole of wispy white fuzz. Malnutrition had distended her belly, leaving her long limbs skeletal.

The lower portion of her face had collapsed on itself, jaw drawn up close to her nose in the absence of intervening teeth. She had no visible lips and the truncated shape of her skull gave her the look of some long-legged, gangly bird with a gaping beak. She was squawking like an ostrich, her bright, black eyes snapping from point to point. The minute she caught sight of us, she fired the bedpan in our direction like a heat-seeking missile. She seemed to be having the tune of her life. A nurse's aide, maybe twenty years old, stood by helplessly. Clearly, her training had never prepared her for the likes of this one.

Mrs. Renquist approached Agnes matter-of-factly, pausing only once to pat the hand of the woman in the next bed who seemed to be praying feverishly for Jesus to take her very soon. Meanwhile, Agnes, having asserted herself, was content to march around on the bedcovers saluting the other patients. To me, it looked like a wonderful form of indoor exercise. Her behavior seemed far healthier than the passivity of her ward-mates, some of whom simply lay in moaning misery. Agnes had probably been a hell-raiser all her life, and her style, in old age, hadn't changed a whit.

"You have a visitor, Mrs. Grey."

"What?"

"You have a visitor."

Agnes paused, peering at me. Her tongue crept into view and then disappeared again. "Who's this?" Her voice was hoarse from screeching. Mrs. Renquist held out a hand to her, helping Agnes down off the bed. The nurse's aide took a clean gown from the nightstand. Mrs. Renquist shook it out and draped it around Agnes's scrawny shoulders, pushing her arms into the sleeves. Agnes submitted with the complaisance of a baby, her rheumy-eyed attention still focused on me. Her skin was speckled with color: pale brown maculae, patches of rose and white, knotty blue veins, crusty places where healing cuts formed fiery lines of red. The epidermal tissue was so thin I half-expected to see the pale gray shapes of internal organs, like those visible on a newly hatched bird. What is it about aging that takes us right back to birth? She smelled sooty and dense, a combination of dried urine and old gym socks. Right away, I started revising the notion of driving back to Santa Teresa in the same tiny car with her. The aide excused herself with a murmur and made a hasty getaway.

I held out a hand politely. "Hello, Agnes. I'm Kinsey Millhone."

"Hah?"

Mrs. Renquist leaned close to Agnes and hollered my name so loud that two other old ladies on the ward woke up and began to make quacking sounds. "Kinsey Millhone. She's a friend of your daughter's. "

Agnes drew back, giving me a suspicious look. "Who?"

"Irene," I yelled.

"Who asked you?" Agnes shot back, peevishly. She began to work her lips mechanically, as if tasting something she'd eaten fifty years before.

Mrs. Renquist repeated the information, enunciating with care. I could see Agnes withdraw. A veil of simplicity seemed to cover her bright gaze and she launched abruptly into a dialogue with herself that made no sense whatever. "Keep hush. Do not say a word. Well, I can if I want. No, you can't. Danger, danger, ooo hush, plenty, plenty. Don't even give a hint…" She began a warbling rendition of "Good Night, Irene."

Mrs. Renquist rolled her eyes and a short, impatient sigh escaped. "She pulls this when she doesn't feel like doing what you want," she said. "She'll snap out of it."

We waited for a moment. Agnes had added gestures and her tone was argumentative. She'd adopted the quarrelsome air of someone in a supermarket express line when the customer at the register tries to cash a paycheck. Whatever universe she'd been transported to, it did not include us.

I drew Mrs. Renquist aside and lowered my voice. "Why don't we leave her alone for the time being," I said. "I'm going to have to put a call through to Mrs. Gersh anyway and ask her what she wants done. There's no point in upsetting her mother any more than we have to."