Page 37

37

The Toe

Before the Keppelwhite Institute financed and constructed County Memorial thirty-five years earlier, area residents had taken their critical illnesses to Fassbinder Hospital, which was located in a less esteemed neighborhood. That facility had been built in 1922 and named after Otto Fassbinder, who served as a medic in World War I. For his exceptional bravery, Otto received numerous military honors that were bestowed on him by General Klaus von Fassbinder, who was said to be no relative whatsoever of Otto. Over the decades, in spite of several investigations conducted by hotheads in Congress and partisan journalists hell-bent on uncovering a scandal, no one could prove the scurrilous rumor that General Klaus von Fassbinder, himself a hero of the United States Army, had in fact been in the service of Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany. Likewise, no tad of evidence was ever found that Senator Adolph Klanghoffer, who steered the bill of appropriation for the hospital through Congress, ever benefited by even as much as one dime from the project. Construction costs had turned out to be four times the original estimate, but this occurred in the Roaring Twenties, when the nation was awash in new money and inflation was bubbling. Soon after General Fassbinder retired from the army, he was worth twelve million dollars, an immense fortune in those days. However, he had acquired his wealth legitimately, for he proved to be a shrewd investor, a genius at stock-market analysis, whose marvelous success could be attributed to his frugality and his uncanny ability to make only the right investments. The fieriest of his critics in the press and elsewhere eventually were revealed as mentally unstable individuals when they either committed suicide or killed each other. Fassbinder Hospital had collapsed in a hailstorm the very year and month that Keppelwhite Institute completed construction of the new hospital and opened the doors to serve the residents of the county.

County Memorial was a U-shaped building with a long wing that lay east to west and two shorter wings that ran from north to south. The immense—some would say megamonolithic—Keppelwhite Institute backed up to the hospital, and in fact connected to the short wings of that health-care facility to form a courtyard. In the center of the courtyard, a massive fountain featured thirty arcing jets of water. In the center of the fountain, on a granite plinth, stood a twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of Gustoff Keppelwhite, the founder of the family empire, who began his working life as an assistant copyboy at the New York Times. In 1891, the year that he married Hilda Fassbinder, Gustoff claimed to have invented the modern hinge and filed for patent protection. The press, even the Times , mocked the young inventor and entrepreneur. However, the prestigious law firm of Klanghoffer, Knacker, Hisscus, and Nork—with lavish offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington—agreed to represent Gustoff Keppelwhite on a contingency basis, whereupon the mockery stopped as abruptly as a capering clown would stop if a piano were dropped on his head from the tenth floor of a high-rise. In just four months, Gustoff’s patent was granted. Thereafter, he received a royalty on every door that was hung, on every pair of eyeglasses manufactured, every breadbox, and thousands of other items.

As Spencer Truedove roamed the third-floor hallways, striving to look like a relative of several patients abed in different wings of the establishment, he couldn’t help but think about the history of the Keppelwhite family, which had been taught from grade school through high school in Maple Grove since the year construction had begun on the institute. As a troubled child, he’d wanted to be a Keppelwhite. As an artist, he’d yearned to see a painting of his installed one day in the home of James Alistair Keppelwhite and Wilamina “Willy” Keppelwhite, the doyen and doyenne of the current generation of the family.

Therefore, he was dismayed as well as unsettled by the effect their hospital exerted on him. As he walked the hallways, stepping into a room here and there and looking it over, wherever intuition led him, he became convinced that a malevolent, unseen presence was aware of him. Cameras were limited to stairwells and public spaces. He knew that, if indeed he was being watched, the watcher was not anything as benign as the security personnel.

Each time that he entered a room where the patients were not sleeping or preoccupied, he asked if either of them was Jim James, who of course was nonexistent, merely an excuse for violating their privacy. In room 344, two middle-aged men were sitting up in their beds. The nearer man was reading a hardcover novel, while the fellow in the second bed agitatedly twisted the segments of a Rubik’s Cube. The book reader looked up and asked, “Can I help you?”

Scanning the room for an anomaly that might be a clue as to why he and his amigos were drawn to the hospital, Spencer said, “I think this is the wrong room. I’m looking for a patient named Jim James.”

“I’m Jim James,” said the man with the book.

“You’re shitting me,” said Spencer.

The guy frowned. “Excuse me?”

“You’re not really Jim James.”

“I’ve been Jim James all my life.”

A medical chart hung by a chain from the footrail of the bed. Spencer lifted it, read it. “Jim Jamie James.”

“My mother was a poet. She liked alliteration.”

“A poet. Would I have heard of her?”

“She was a bad poet,” said Jim Jamie James. “She was never published. But she was a sweet, dear soul.”

“My mother abandoned me,” Spencer said, surprised to have made such a personal revelation to a stranger. There was something about Jim Jamie James that made Spencer want to open his heart to the guy and perhaps become lifelong friends. “She went off to New Orleans to relive a past life.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“I was devastated.”

“Did you get counseling?”

“No. I wish I had.”

“My father was a sweet, dear soul. We can always count on our dads to get us through anything.”

In the second bed, the man with the Rubik’s Cube began to curse it in the most explicit terms.

“ My father was gone,” Spencer said.

An expression of profound sympathy drew Jim James’s face into a longer geometry. “I’m so sorry. How old were you when he died?”

“Oh, he’s still alive. He abandoned me, too.”

“How extraordinary. Why would he do such a thing?”

“He opened a church for sexual degenerates and took a hooker for his common-law wife.”

“Well, that’s unusual. How did you feel about that?”

“I got through it, thanks to my amigos.”

“Friends are treasures,” Jim James said. “Has your father explained himself to you? Is he regretful?”

“We don’t really talk that much. He’s in prison for sticking up armored cars. What about you? What’re you in hospital for?”

“My toe.”

“What’s the matter with your toe?”

“I’d rather not talk about it. I’m a positive person. I don’t like to dwell on the horrors of the world.”

A nurse appeared with a dinner tray, put it on a wheeled table, and maneuvered it in front of Jim James.

To Spencer, Jim said, “Don’t go just because my dinner is here. Keep me company. Chat a little while.”

In the far bed, the guy with the Rubik’s Cube was red-faced, sweating rivers, and still cursing.

With a smile, indicating his roommate with a hitchhiker’s gesture of the thumb, Jim James said, “Harry is a nice man, a good God-fearing man, but intense. At the moment, he’s not the best company.”

“I’ve got some work to do,” Spencer said. “But I’ll come back to visit tomorrow if you think you’ll still be here.”

“Oh, I’ll be here. I’ll be here a long time. I’ll be here a heck of a lot longer than tomorrow, with this toe.”

The nurse brought a second dinner tray from the cart in the hall and carried it toward the wheeled table that was associated with Harry’s bed.

Jim James said, “Pudding for dessert again. I despise pudding.”

On hearing that, Spencer marveled that fate had brought him to this room.

“I hate to waste things,” Jim James said. “Would you like my pudding?”

“I despise pudding, too,” said Spencer.

Jim James said, “The only pudding I’ll eat is crème br?lée.”

“Me too! But nobody calls it pudding.”

“Nobody does,” Jim James agreed, “but, darn it, crème br?lée is pudding.”

As the nurse tried to maneuver the wheeled table in front of Harry, he cursed the Rubik’s Cube, threw it at a wall, cursed the nurse, and began to spasm in the strangest way.

The nurse pressed the call button on Harry’s bed and alerted the physician on duty. “Heart attack in three forty-four. I need help stat.”

“Well, this is a downer,” said Jim James. “But I’m sure he’ll be okay. They provide excellent care here.”

Spencer said, “I better be going, get out of their way.”

“You’ll come back tomorrow?”

“I’ll certainly try,” Spencer assured Jim James. He stepped out of the room as a doctor and a bevy of nurses arrived on the run.

The scene was powerful, dramatic. Spencer wished he were the kind of artist who could draw so that he could produce a painting that would convey the emotion of the moment, but he wasn’t that kind of artist.

Two minutes later, at the south end of the southeast wing of County Memorial, he came to a fire-rated metal door that was closed. A sign declared no admittance / credentialed personnel only.

The short wings of the hospital connected with the Keppelwhite Institute. He wondered what part of the institute might be found beyond this door.

He looked behind him. The hallway was deserted at the moment, perhaps because the staff in the immediate area had been summoned to Jim and Harry’s room.

When he tried the lever handle, he was not surprised to find the door locked. What did surprise him was the chill that shivered through him and the sense of dread that made his heart race and his knees quiver as if they would fail him.

Here. Here is where they’d gone on that long-ago Thanksgiving. They had seen something beyond this door that they had been made to forget—something they needed to remember if they were to save Ernie and themselves.