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If she could get through the locked ward door, she was convinced she could escape the hospital. A guard stood on duty in the lobby, but he hardly ever stopped people. Many outpatients came and went, and furloughs for inpatients were common. She knew she could make it, once past that ward door. But because she had run away, they watched her even more closely than the others. Whenever she loitered near the door, the attendants or the nurse would ask what she thought she was doing. She ran out of excuses. Sometimes she would hang around the nursing station making conversation with staff in order to keep an eye on the door, trying to shape a plan for getting through it, but if she looked at the door too much they got suspicious. Then she would try to redeem herself by offering to make coffee for them. The doctors had their own fancy automatic coffee machine in an alcove outside the conference room. Redding drank ten to fourteen cups a day, and the secretary Patty or one of the aides or attendants made it fresh every couple of hours. The lower staff sometimes drank the doctors’ coffee, but mostly used an electric percolator in the little kitchen. Sometimes patients were allowed to used the percolator or to drink an occasional cup of coffee in the afternoon. For Co
“I’m sorry you didn’t make it out,” she said to Tina as they got ready for bed.
Tina did not answer for a while. Then she said in a soft, remote voice, “My man, the only man I ever loved all the way through and through. Down to the pit of my stomach. They sent him up for thirty years. It might as well be life. Twice a year I get up to see him. Fifteen minutes through a grille. He’s getting old fast there. His hair’s coming out and his teeth … It might as well be for life!”
At bedtime, as Co
What was it, her Catholic upbringing that kept her from thinking about suicide? Just as contraception had always felt more of a sin than falling into bed. Somehow it was not in her. “I have my own way,” she told Skip, muttering on the drafty back porch of sleep in the wind that blew through the sepia screens from the cold world’s end where they piled the corpses. In the bleak moonlight she whispered to Skip. “I’m fighting too. Even now, when like you I bow, I lick their feet, I crawl and beg, I am biding my time. Wait and see what I do.”
At lunch of macaroni and a little cheese she said to Sybil, “No trust? After all this time you don’t know me?”
“How can I know my friend when I see her kowtowing to the Inquisition?” Sybil sipped her milk as if it were wine, looking down her arched and bony nose.
“We’re at war, Sybil, don’t you see that?”
“Some war! More like a massacre.” Sybil snorted. “Soon to be burned at the stake–the small stake. More cost‑effective, as the grand master says.”
“It’s a war,Sybil … . If I could get out on furlough, I know I could run for it. The city’s so close here. Once off this ward, we’d have it made! People come in and out of this building all day, outpatients, volunteers. If only I could make it to the elevators!”
“There’s a lot more coming and going, yes,” Sybil said thoughtfully, “but also more perso
“You’ve been watching too.”
Sybil smiled. “The volunteers, some are college girls. The hippie one who comes in Thursdays, Mary Ellen? Nurse Roditis told her that, quote, I thinkI’m a witch and go around hexing people, unquote. Mary Ellen came and asked me, quote, if I was into herbs.”
“So what did you say?” She felt close to her friend.
“I said I was into this ward, although unwillingly. But I’m interested in herbs and have done some healing with them.”
“Was she making fun of you?”
Sybil shook her head. “She told me lots of college students are interested in herbs. We discussed valerian, thyme, rosemary, comfrey. Finally she asked if I really was a witch, and when I assured her, she seemed quite pleased. She said several of her friends are ‘into’ witchcraft. She said she’s trying to secure permission for one of her friends to meet me.”
“You don’t think she was … laughing inside the way they do?”
“No, Consuelo. She’d read an herbal and cured a leg infection with lovage compresses. We had the most civilized conversation I’ve had in ages. Except for yourself, of course. I was worried about you when they had that device in your head.”
“Ah, I don’t know herbs from weeds.” She thought of Luciente feeding her that wild greenery and her mouth opened to tell Sybil. She shut it, then after a moment said, “My grandmother knew weeds to heal with. But even my parents made fun of that. It wasn’t modern and scientific–like going in the hospital and dying of an infection!”
“Imagine, college girls studying witchcraft. She said there was a class in a women’s school. I never heard of such a thing. If only I could have attended college, Consuelo … I am self‑educated. I wanted to go to school, wanted it a great deal.”
“Me too. I went for almost two years.”
“I started part time. In night school. But it was expensive. I’d have to come home quite late at night, and then get up early to go to work … . I should have continued, Consuelo. I should have had the discipline!”
“It takes more than discipline. It takes money. It takes good public transportation.”
“I wonder who teaches them witchcraft. Imagine”–Sybil’s voice caressed her ear, tickling like a warm tongue–“a secret network of covens all over New York! Imagine the bars crumbling on the windows. Imagine the doctors fainting in the halls! The locks melting and ru
“Don’t dawdle over your lunch, girls. Come on, make it snappy.” The orderly Tony urged them along, swinging the keys in time to his transistor. He wrapped himself in music all day to insulate himself from the hospital, the patients, the boredom. “Turn ditum, you just march it along.”
“We can imagine all we like. But we got to do something real,” Co
Sybil shook her head at the expression. “If we can figure out a way, I’m willing.”
Dolly buzzed in, all in yellow. “Hi, Co
“What, they need him to sign another permission?”
“He says he wants to see you. The hospital told him you’re better. Look, I brought you a real chic wig. Black, the way you said you wanted. Pues, Tнa? Give me a smile.”
Valente and Sybil and Miss Green and even Tina, nodding out a little on the bed’s edge, gathered around Dolly and her. Most of Dolly’s precious visit got wasted on the wig. The wig was put on and she was commanded, among oohing and ahing, to stare at herself. Her bleary bloodshot eyes, her chapped and bitten lips, her hospital ashiness looked out from under sleek hair curled and combed just so, black and elegant. The wig felt heavy and she sat bearing it up on her short neck like a crown.
“Dolly, please!” She clutched her niece’s arm. “Get me out of here. Let me come home to visit you. I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving here. Please talk to them about letting me come home to you for Thanksgiving. I’ll cook for you, hermana mнa. Remember how I used to? We’ll get Nita and have a real Thanksgiving!”
“Maybe, Co