American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [2]
Pearl did not see him. She was looking just to the left of him, beyond him, and she was beautiful. She was beautiful in a simple, lovely way that he knew like he knew a song. Her eyes were squinting a little and she held a small piece of paper in her small hand and standing next to her and clearly with her was someone he didn’t know, a woman. The woman was looking also at the crowd, or past it, and seemed to be saying something to Pearl. In all likelihood she was asking her what he looked like but the expression on the woman’s face was so calm and unquestioning that she might have been talking about something completely unrelated. It was as though she was not aware of the movement around her, or if she was, it did not concern her. She seemed to occupy her own air. She was taller than Pearl. She was wearing sunglasses.
As he approached and Pearl saw him her lipsticked lips burst apart and she rushed toward him and held him and the person next to her stood still in her own atmosphere. Only after he and Pearl had kissed and he had stroked her temples and eyelids with his thumb and she had clasped her hand on the back of his neck and they had said hello with their eyes did the air open up around the other person enough for him to actually look at her face. That’s when he observed the curve of her cheek, like a dangerous road, and the elegant line of her mouth. In each of the lenses of her round sunglasses floated a tiny, perfect ship.
Still, he could not quite look at her.
2005
The hospital was the oldest veterans’ hospital in New York. It stood atop a hill on the highest point in the city, a spot that had been a strategic vantage point during the Revolutionary War. In 1847 the millionaire William Bailey, later of Barnum & Bailey Circus, had built an estate on this location for his bride. In 1922 the veterans’ bureau had bought the land and set up a hospital for veterans suffering from mental and nervous disorders. In 1970 Life magazine had run a feature on the hospital exposing its deplorable conditions. Paralyzed vets lay on one side for ten hours without being moved or washed. Without enough attendants to empty them, the urine bags to which the men were hooked up spilled over onto the floor. When and if they were given a shower, the men could wait helplessly for hours to be dried, and often they were put back into bed on the same sweaty sheets. There were rats. A paralyzed veteran might suddenly awaken to find a rat on his hand. He could not move his hand, so he would try to jerk his shoulders. He screamed, and the rat jumped casually off the bed. In the paraplegic ward, a completely crippled patient would depend on a buddy who still had the use of his arms to get a sheet thrown, sailing and rippling and falling like a shroud, over his bed.
As a result of the Life magazine exposé, the hospital was overhauled and conditions were vastly improved. More than thirty years later those who were aware enough of their circumstances to appreciate them, or the families of those who weren’t, felt lucky to be living or have their loved ones living in this hospital and not in a bad hospital and not out on the streets. The ever-increasing number of homeless veterans was a decades-old national tragedy. During the day they lingered in the parks and on