Page 71 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 41

Every visit back introduced Ryan to some new horror of modern med-
icine. This time, the time of the promise, his father lay motionless, gaunt,
in the crisp white bed. His blood circulated through clear dialysis tubes.
The pleasant nun in attendance walked Ryan out to the hall explaining
that dialysis was really like a giant washing machine. “It’s my father’s
blood, not his laundry,” Ryan said. “I’m sorry.” He apologized quickly,
thanked the sister, and walked down to the end of the long terrazzo cor-
ridor. He had in this hospital his fill not of the nuns, but of the priest,
their chaplain, who one bloody night, when Ryan discovered his father
unconscious and hemorrhaging alone in his room, told Ryan, that God
must want another Saint Charles in heaven. Ryan had grabbed the startled
priest by the lapels of his black suit: “My father is going to live!” It was
probably the first time the priest had ever been told to fuck himself. After
that the chaplain confined his ministrations to Annie Laurie. Ryan could
not mind that. For his mother, priests provided her only consolation. Ryan
wondered what she really thought about his leaving Misericordia Semi-
nary the year before his own ordination to the Catholic priesthood.
The hospital was in a continual state of remodeling and reconstruction.
The old wing where Thom and Margaret Mary had both been born was,
in the last days of that Illinois June, nearly leveled by the wrecker’s ball.
“For ten years,” Annie Laurie said, making conversation in waiting rooms,
“they’ve been rebuilding the hospital around us.” Ryan paced the length of
a corridor that ended abruptly where the wrecking crew had stopped for
the day. The gutted hall glowed with the dark luster that happens before
a Midwestern twilight. At its western end, huge swaths of opaque plastic
sheets billowed inward from the updraft. The broken lip of the hall floor
stopped abruptly six stories from the hard ground. The hospital was suf-
focating him. He could feel the barometer falling. He knew if he climbed
over the lath and plaster debris, and through the plastic, he could stand on
the ledge of a hall that had once led to obstetrics. No one was around to stop
him. A construction worker’s sandwich sat abandoned on an improvised
two-by-four of a table. No nurses or nuns hovered around this drafty end
of deserted corridor. Far down the hall, behind him, he watched them, kind
women, starchy and white, sailing silent through the pools of light at their
main station.
He climbed through the dust and plaster shards. He needed to be
anywhere no one could find him. A hospital has no privacy. He needed
air. He needed to remember to breathe. He needed great gulps of air. The
ragged concrete ledge ended with snaggled rebar twisted by the powerful
wrecking ball. He stood on the narrow ledge, six stories above the rubble

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