“Miss?”
I glanced up. A woman in a nurse’s uniform was staring at me. I focused on my surroundings. I could see now that the corridor was populated with wheel-chairs. Everyone was old and broken and bent. Some stared dully at the floor and some made mewing sounds. One woman repeated endlessly the same quarrelsome request: “Someone let me out of here. Someone let me up. Someone let me out of here …”
“I’m looking for Agnes Grey.”
“Patient or employee?”
“A patient. At least she was a couple of months back.”
“Try administration.” She indicated the offices to my right. I collected myself, blanking out the sight of the feeble and infirm. Maybe life is just a straight shot from the horrors of grade school to the horrors of the nursing home.
The administration offices were housed in makeshift quarters where the principal’s office had probably been once upon a time. A portion of the large central hallway had been annexed and was now enclosed in glass, providing a small reception area, which was furnished with a wooden bench. I waited at the counter until a woman emerged from the inner office with an armload of files. She caught sight of me and veered in my direction with a public-relations smile. “May I help you?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I’m looking for a woman named Agnes Grey. I understand she was a patient here a few months ago.”
The woman hesitated briefly and then said, “May I ask what this is in connection with?”
I took a chance on the truth, never guessing how popular I was going to be as a consequence. I gave her my card and then recited my tale of Irene Gersh and how she’d asked me to determine her mother’s whereabouts, ending with the oft-repeated query: “Do you happen to know where she is at this point?”
She blinked at me for a moment. Some interior process caused a transformation in her face, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how it related to my request. “Would you excuse me, please?”
“Sure.”
She moved into the inner office and emerged a moment later with a second woman, who introduced herself as Mrs. Elsie Haynes, administrator of the facility. She was probably in her sixties, rotund, with a hairstyle that was whisker-short along the neck and topped by a toupee of ginger-colored curls. This made her face appear too large for her head. She was, however, smiling at me most pleasantly. “Miss Millhone, how very nice,” she said, holding out her hands. The handshake consisted of her making a hand sandwich with my right hand as the lunch meat. “I’m Mrs. Haynes, but you must call me Elsie. Now how can we be of help?”
This was worrisome. I usually don’t get such receptions in my line of work. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m trying to locate a woman named Agnes Grey. I understand she was transferred here from Pioneers.”
“That’s correct. Mrs. Grey has been with us since early March. I’m sure you’ll want to see her, so I’ve asked the floor supervisor to join us. She’ll take you up to Mrs. Grey’s room.”
“Great. I’d appreciate that. Frankly, I didn’t expect to find her here. I guess I thought she’d be out by now. Is she doing okay?”
“Oh my, yes. She’s considerably better . . . quite well … but we have been concerned about continued care. We can’t release a patient who has no place to go. As nearly as we can tell, Mrs. Grey doesn’t have a permanent address and she’s never admitted to having any next of kin. We’re delighted to hear that she has relatives living in the state. I’m sure you’ll want to notify Mrs. Gersh and make arrangements to have her transferred to a comparable facility in Santa Teresa.”
Ahh. I felt myself nodding. Her Medi-Cal benefits were running out. I tried a public-relations smile of my own, unwilling to commit Irene Gersh to anything. “I’m not sure what Mrs. Gersh will want to do. I told her I’d call as soon as I found out what was going on. She’ll probably need to talk to you before she makes any decisions, but I’m assuming she’ll ask me to drive Agnes back to Santa Teresa with me.”
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 tanned, with a wide, good-natured mouth and the dusky, lined complexion of a smoker. Her dark auburn hair was pulled back in a knot shaped like a doughnut, probably supported by one of those squishy nylon devices they sell at Woolworth’s. The three women seemed to hover about me like secular nuns, full of murmurs and reassurances. Within minutes, Mrs. Renquist and I were out in the corridor, heading toward the ward.
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.