Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings Read online

  ‘One dollar.’ Carmey’s tone is strictly business.

  The boy holds out his left hand. ‘I want Ruth.’ He draws an imaginary line across his left wrist. ‘Right here … so I can cover it up with a watch if I want to.’

  His two friends guffaw from the doorway.

  Carmey points to the straight chair and lays his half-smoked cigarette on the Lazy Susan between two dye-pots. The boy sits down, schoolbooks balanced on his lap.

  ‘What happens’, Mr Tomolillo asks of the world in general, ‘if you choose to change a name? Do you just cross it off and write the next above it?’

  ‘You could’, Ned suggests, ‘wear a watch over the old name so only the new name showed.’

  ‘And then another watch’, I say, ‘over that, when there’s a third name.’

  ‘Until your arm,’ Mr Tomolillo nods, ‘is up to the shoulder with watches.’

  Carmey is shaving the thin scraggly growth of hairs from the boy’s wrist. ‘You’re taking a lot of ragging from somebody.’

  The boy stares at his wrist with a self-conscious and unsteady smile, a smile that is maybe only a public-substitute for tears. With his right hand he clutches his schoolbooks to keep them from sliding off his knee.

  Carmey finishes marking R-U-T-H on the boy’s wrist and holds the needle poised. ‘She’ll bawl you out when she sees this.’ But the boy nods him to go ahead.

  ‘Why?’ Ned asks. ‘Why should she bawl him out?’

  ‘Gone and got yourself tattooed!’ Carmey mimicks a mincing disgust. ‘And with just a name! Is that all you think of me?—She’ll be wanting roses, birds, butterflies …’ The needle sticks for a second and the boy flinches like a colt. ‘And if you do get all that stuff to please her—roses …’

  ‘Birds and butterflies,’ Mr Tomolillo puts in.

  ‘…she’ll say, sure as rain at a ball game: What’d you want to go and spend all that money for?’ Carmey whizzes the needle clean in the bowl of antiseptic. ‘You can’t beat a woman.’ A few meagre blood drops stand up along the four letters—letters so black and plain you can hardly tell it’s a tattoo and not just inked in with a pen. Carmey tapes a narrow bandage of Kleenex over the name. The whole operation lasts less than ten minutes.

  The boy fishes a crumpled dollar bill from his back pocket. His friends cuff him fondly on the shoulder and the three of them crowd out the door, all at the same time, nudging, pushing, tripping over their feet. Several faces, limpet-pale against the window, melt away as Carmey’s eye lingers on them.

  ‘No wonder he doesn’t want a heart, that kid, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He’ll be back next week asking for a Betty or a Dolly or some such, you wait.’ He sighs, and goes to the cardboard file and pulls out a stack of those photographs he wouldn’t put on the wall and passes them around. ‘One picture I would like to get,’ Carmey leans back in the swivel chair and props his cowboy boots on a little carton. ‘The butterfly. I got pictures of the rabbit hunt. I got pictures of ladies with snakes winding up their legs and into them, but I could make a lot of sweet dough if I got a picture of the butterfly on a woman.’

  ‘Some queer kind of butterfly nobody wants?’ Ned peers in the general direction of my stomach as at some highgrade saleable parchment.

  ‘It’s not what, it’s where. One wing on the front of each thigh. You know how butterflies on a flower make their wings flutter, ever so little? Well, any move a woman makes, these wings look to be going in and out, in and out. I’d like a photograph of that so much I’d practically do a butterfly for free.’

  I toy, for a second, with the thought of a New Guinea Golden, wings extending from hipbone to kneecap, ten times life-size, but drop it fast. A fine thing if I got tired of my own skin sooner than last year’s sack.

  ‘Plenty of women ask for butterflies in that particular spot,’ Carmey goes on, ‘but you know what, not one of them will let a photograph be taken after the job’s done. Not even from the waist down. Don’t imagine I haven’t asked. You’d think everybody over the whole United States would recognize them from the way they carry on when its even mentioned.’

  ‘Couldn’t’, Mr Tomolillo ventures shyly, ‘the wife oblige? Make it a little family affair?’

  Carmey’s face skews up in a pained way. ‘Naw,’ he shakes his head, his voice weighted with an old wonder and regret. ‘Naw, Laura won’t hear of the needle. I used to think the idea of it’d grow on her after a bit, but nothing doing. She makes me feel, sometimes, what do I see in it all. Laura’s white as the day she was born. Why, she hates tattoos.’

  Up to this moment I have been projecting, fatuously, intimate visits with Laura at Carmey’s place. I have been imagining a lithe, supple Laura, a butterfly poised for flight on each breast, roses blooming on her buttocks, a gold-guarding dragon on her back and Sinbad the Sailor in six colors on her belly, a woman with Experience written all over her, a woman to learn from in this life. I should have known better.

  The four of us are slumped there in a smog of cigarette smoke, not saying a word, when a round, muscular woman comes into the shop, followed closely by a greasy-haired man with a dark, challenging expression. The woman is wrapped to the chin in a woolly electric-blue coat; a fuchsia kerchief covers all but the pompadour of her glinting blond hair. She sits down in the chair in front of the window regardless of Mount Calvary and proceeds to stare fixedly at Carmey. The man stations himself next to her and keeps a severe eye on Carmey too, as if expecting him to bolt without warning.

  There is a moment of potent silence.

  ‘Why,’ Carmey says pleasantly, but with small heart, ‘here’s the Wife now.’

  I take a second look at the woman and rise from my comfortable seat on the crate at Carmey’s elbow. Judging from his watchdog stance, I gather the strange man is either Laura’s brother or her bodyguard or a low-class private detective in her employ. Mr Tomilillo and Ned are moving with one accord toward the door.

  ‘We must be running along,’ I murmur, since nobody else seems inclined to speak.

  ‘Say hello to the people, Laura,’ Carmey begs, back to the wall. I can’t help but feel sorry for him, even a little ashamed. The starch is gone out of Carmey now, and the gay talk.

  Laura doesn’t say a word. She is waiting with the large calm of a cow for the three of us to clear out. I imagine her body, death-lily-white and totally bare—the body of a woman immune as a nun to the eagle’s anger, the desire of the rose. From Carmey’s wall the world’s menagerie howls and ogles at her alone.

  The Daughters of Blossom Street

  As it turns out, I don’t need any hurricane warnings over the seven a.m. news-and-weather to tell me today will be a bad day. First thing when I come down the third floor hall of the Clinics’ Building to open up the office I find a pile of patients’ records waiting for me just outside the door, punctual as the morning paper. But it is a thin pile, and sure as Thursday’s a full day with us, I know I’ll have to spend a good half hour phoning every station in the Record Room to chase those missing records down. Already, so early in the morning, my white eyelet blouse is losing starch, and I can feel a little wet patch spreading under each arm. The sky outside is low, thick, and yellow as hollandaise. I shove open the one window in the office to change the air; nothing happens. Everything hangs still, heavier than wet laundry in a basement. Then I cut the string around the record folders and, staring up at me from the cover of the top record, I see stamped in red ink: DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.

  I try to make the letters out to read DEAF, only it doesn’t work. Not that I’m superstitious. Even though the ink is smeared rusty as blood on the cover of the case history, it simply means Lillian Ulmer is Dead, and Number Nine-one-seven-oh-six cancelled in the Record Room’s active file for once and forever. Grim Billy at Station Nine has mixed the numbers up again, meaning me no harm. Still and all, with the sky so dark, and the hurricane rumbling up the coast, closer every time I turn around, I feel Lillian Ulmer, rest her soul, has started my day off o
n the wrong foot.

  When my boss Miss Taylor comes in, I ask why they don’t burn the records of the people gone to Blossom Street to save room in the files. But she says they often keep the records around a bit, if the disease is interesting, in case there might be a statistical survey of patients who lived or died with it.

  It was my friend Dotty Berrigan in Alcoholic Clinic told me about Blossom Street. Dotty took it on herself to show me around the Hospital when I first signed on as Secretary in Adult Psychiatric, she being right down the hall from me and we sharing a lot of cases.

  ‘You must have a lot of people dead here every day,’ I said.

  ‘You bet,’ she said. ‘And all the accidents and beatings up you could want from the South End coming into Emergency Ward steady as taxes.’

  ‘Well, where do they keep them, the dead ones?’ I didn’t want suddenly by mistake to walk into a room of people laid out or cut up, and it seemed only too easy at that point for me to get lost in the numberless levels of corridors in the greatest General Hospital in the world.

  ‘In a room off Blossom Street, I’ll show you where. The doctors never say anyone died in so many words, you know, because of making the patients morbid. They say: “How many of yours went to Blossom Street this week?” And the other guy’ll say: “Two.” Or “Five.” Or however many. Because the Blossom Street exit’s where the bodies get shipped off to the funeral parlors to be fixed up for burying.’

  You can’t beat Dotty. She’s a regular mine of information, having to go about, as she does, checking for alcoholics in Emergency Ward and comparing notes with the doctors on duty in Psychiatric Ward, not to mention her dating various members of the hospital staff, even a surgeon once, and another time a Persian intern. Dotty is Irish—shortish, and a little plump, but she dresses to make the best of it: always something blue—heaven blue to match her eyes, and these snug black jumpers she runs off herself from Vogue patterns, and high pumps with the spindly steel heels.

  Cora, in Psychiatric Social Service down the hall from Dotty and me, is nowhere near the person Dotty is—pushing forty, you can tell it by the pleats around her eyes, even if she does keep her hair red, thanks to these colored rinses. Cora lives with her mother, and to hear her talk you’d think she was a green teenager. She had three of the girls in Nerve Clinic over her place one night, for bridge and supper, and stuck the casserole into the oven with the frozen raspberry tarts and wondered an hour later they weren’t warm, when all the time she hadn’t thought to turn the oven on. Cora keeps taking these bus trips to Lake Louise and these cruises to Nassau in her vacations to meet Mr Right, but all she ever meets is girls from Tumour Clinic or Amputee Clinic and every one of them on the selfsame mission.

  Anyhow, the third Thursday of the month being the day we have our Secretaries’ Meeting in the Hunnewell Room on the second floor, Cora calls for Dotty and the two of them call for me, and we click-clack in our heels down the stone stairs and into this really handsome room, dedicated as it says on a bronze plaque over the door, to a Doctor Augustus Hunnewell in 1892. The place is full of glass cases crammed with old-fashioned medical instruments, and the walls are covered with faded, reddish-brown tintypes of Civil War doctors, their beards bushy and long as the beards of the Smith Brothers on those cough-drop packets. Set in the middle of the room, and stretching almost from wall to wall, is a great, dark, oval walnut-wood table, legs carved in the shape of lions’ legs, only with scales instead of fur, and the whole top polished so you can see your face in it. Around this table we sit smoking and talking, waiting for Mrs Rafferty to come in and start the meeting.

  Minnie Dapkins, the tiny white-haired receptionist in Skin, is handing around pink and yellow referral slips. ‘Is there a Doctor Crawford in Nerve?’ she asks, holding up a pink slip.

  ‘Doctor Crawford!’ Mary Ellen in Nerve bursts out laughing, her black bulk jiggling like a soft aspic in the flowered print dress. ‘He’s dead six, seven years, who wants him?’

  Minnie purses her mouth to a tight pink bud, ‘A patient said she had Doctor Crawford,’ she returns coldly. Minnie can’t stand disrespect for the dead. She’s been working at the Hospital since she was married in the Depression and just got her Twenty-five Year Silver Service Pin at a special ceremony at the Secretaries’ Christmas Party last winter, but the story goes she hasn’t cracked a joke about a patient or a dead person in all her time. Not like Mary Ellen, or Dotty, or even Cora, who isn’t above seeing the humor in a situation.

  ‘What are you girls going to do about the hurricane?’ Cora asks Dotty and me in a low voice, leaning across the table to dab off her cigarette ash in the glass ash tray with the Hospital seal showing through the bottom. ‘I’m worried blue about my car. That motor gets wet in a sea breeze, it stops dead.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t hit till after we’re well through work,’ Dotty says, casual as usual. ‘You’ll make it home.’

  ‘I still don’t like the look of the sky.’ Cora wrinkles her freckled nose as if she smelt something bad.

  I don’t much like the look of the sky either. The room has been darkening steadily since we came in, until we are now all sitting in a kind of twilight, smoke drifting up from our cigarettes and hanging its pall in the already dense air. For a minute no one says anything. Cora seems to have spoken out loud everybody’s secret worry.

  ‘Well, well, well, what’s the matter with us, girls! We’re gloomy as a funeral!’ The electric lights in the four copper lamp bowls overhead flash on, and, almost magically, the room brightens, shutting the stormy sky off in the distance where it belongs, harmless as a painted stage backdrop. Mrs Rafferty steps up to the head of the table, her silver bangles making a cheerful music on each arm, her pendant earrings, exact replicas, in miniature, of stethoscopes, bouncing gaily from her plump earlobes. With an agreeable flurry she sets her notes and papers down on the table, her tinted blonde chignon gleaming under the lights like a cap of mail. Even Cora can’t be sour-faced in front of such professional sunniness. ‘We’ll get our affairs cleared up in a jiffy and then I’ve told one of the girls to send in the coffee machine and we’ll have a little pick-me-up.’ Mrs Rafferty glances around the table, absorbing, with a gratified smile, the exclamations of good feeling.

  ‘Give her credit,’ Dotty mutters in my ear. ‘The old girl ought to market it.’

  Mrs Rafferty starts out with one of her jolly scoldings. Mrs Rafferty is really a buffer. A buffer between us and the hierarchies of Administration, and a buffer between us and the Doctors, with their odd, endless follies and foibles, their illegible handwriting (‘I’ve seen better in kindergarten myself,’ Mrs Rafferty is reported to have said), their childlike inability to paste prescriptions and reports on the right page in the patients’ record books, and so on. ‘Now girls,’ she says, raising one finger playfully, ‘I’m having all sorts of complaints about the daily statistics. Some of them are coming down without the Clinic stamp or date.’ She pauses, to let the enormity of this sink in. ‘Some aren’t added correctly. Some,’ another pause, ‘aren’t coming down at all.’ I lower my eyes and try to will away the blush I feel rising to heat my cheeks. The blush is not for myself, but for my boss, Miss Taylor, who confided to me shortly after my arrival that, to be perfectly open and above board, she hates statistics. Our patients’ interviews with the staff psychiatrists often run over the Clinic’s official closing time, and of course Miss Taylor can’t get the statistics turned in downstairs every night unless she’s going to be more of a martyr to the Office than she is anyway. ‘Enough said girls.’

  Mrs Rafferty glances down at her notes, bends to make a check mark with her red pencil, and straightens, easy as a reed. ‘Another thing. Record Room says they’re getting a lot of calls for records you already have on hand in your Hold Boxes, and they’re simply infuriated down there….’

  ‘Infuriated is right,’ Mary Ellen groans good-naturedly, rolling her eyes so for a minute nothing but the whites are showing. ‘That guy what’s-his-na
me at Station Nine acts like we shouldn’t call in at all anyhow.’

  ‘Oh, that’s Billy,’ says Minnie Dapkins.

  Ida Kline and a couple of the other girls from the Typing Pool in the First Basement titter among themselves, and then hush up.

  ‘I guess you girls all know by now,’ Mrs Rafferty sends a meaning smile around the table, ‘Billy’s got troubles of his own. So let’s not be too hard on him.’

  ‘Isn’t he seeing somebody in your Clinic?’ Dotty asks me in a whisper. I just have time to nod, when Mrs Rafferty’s clear green eye silences us like an ice bath.

  ‘I’ve got a complaint myself, Mrs Rafferty,’ Cora puts in, taking advantage of the interruption. ‘What’s going on down there at Admissions, I wonder? I tell our patients to come in an hour early for appointments with the girls in Social Service, so they’ll have plenty of time to get through the line downstairs and pay the cashier and all, and that’s still not early enough. They call up frantic from downstairs, ten minutes late already, and say the line’s not moving for half an hour, and the Social Service girls on my end are waiting too, so what should I do in a case like that?’

  Mrs Rafferty’s eyes drop, for the briefest moment, to her notes, as if she had the answer to Cora’s question outlined there. She seems almost embarrassed. ‘Some of the other girls have complained of that too, Cora,’ she says finally, looking up. ‘We’re short a girl at Admissions, so it’s a terrible job to do all the processing …’

  Can’t they get a guhl?’ Mary Ellen asks boldly. ‘I mean, what’s holding them up?’

  Mrs Rafferty exchanges a quick look with Minnie Dapkins. Minnie rubs her pale, papery hands together and licks at her lips in that rabbity way she has. Outside the open windows a small wind has suddenly risen, and it sounds as if it is beginning to rain, though it is probably only the rustle and scrape of papers starting to blow about down in the street. ‘I guess I may as well come straight out and tell everybody,’ Mrs Rafferty says then. ‘Some of you know already, Minnie here knows, the reason we’re holding up filling that position is … Emily Russo. You tell them, Minnie.’