CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Hospital Visit
The hospital floor shined with wax, as clean linen does of the finest flax.
Dante’s first thought, upon entering a brightly lit waiting area, was not to slip and fall down. He walked gingerly between several rows of plastic chairs. There was a TV on the wall, unplugged. Stacks of magazines lay fanned on a glass table. An old woman with a cane looked at him through heroic spectacles.
“No smoking!” she barked, squeezing the cane with blue knuckles. “My husband has emphysema!”
Ignoring her, Dante made his way to the service desk and inquired as to where he might find Mr. Horatio Donati. The nurse was a woman not much younger than the one behind him. She frowned at Dante, sizing him up with a pair of stormy gray eyes that perfectly matched the curls of hair poking from beneath her cap.
“We don’t have anyone here by that name,” she said.
“Try looking first,” Dante told her.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re excused. Now I’m looking for Horatio Donati. He got sick yesterday—mild cardiac episode—and they brought him here.”
The nurse’s jaw hung open. “My goodness, you’re a rude boy, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t come in that way.”
“You’re going to leave or I’m going to have you removed.”
“Hello!” a youngish-looking gentleman with black hair cut in. “Can I be of help?”
Dante repeated his request, to which the gentleman responded by looking at the nurse’s computer. After a few keystrokes Donati’s name popped right up.
“Room 112,” the gentleman said. “You can go right down. I’m Doctor Slater, by the way.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Dante said, and without sparing the nurse another glance, left the desk.
112 was at the end of a hall lined with healthy plants whose stems drooped from their pots. To Dante they looked ready to get up and walk. Several Christmas decorations hung on the walls—stockings, silver bells, Santa Clauses—as well as the door to Donati’s room, which was covered in green crepe paper. He raised his fist to knock, then decided that unless Donati had a nurse in the room he wouldn’t be able to answer.
Dante turned the knob instead. The door opened on a quiet, brightly lit room. Quiet for two reasons: The TV, like the one outside, was switched off, and the bed was empty. This second detail took Dante by surprise at first, until he noticed a wheelchair at the window, along with its occupant: Horatio Donati.
Despite his surroundings he didn’t look ready to present his ticket at Saint Peter’s gate just yet. His round face, Dante saw, was still ruddy with life, the curls of his black hair still rich. To judge by his belly he hadn’t been skipping out on the brioche. And most important of all his eyes, which had thus far not noticed they had a visitor, looked bright and aware. They were set on the window—or rather, what lay beyond. It couldn’t have been much. Dante knew the hospital was built in a circle around a plain green lawn, and that Donati’s window looked out upon that lawn. Still, the opera singer appeared as the nurse who’d spoken to Dante’s father had promised: comfortable and fully alert.
“Hello,” Dante said, stepping forward.
Donati’s head turned, and when their eyes met, his face broke into a wide smile. “Dante!” he called, raising his arms. “My boy! Mi sei mancato!”
What he wanted with those raised arms could not have been more plain. Smiling, Dante crossed the room and hugged his friend hard. “`E bello vederti,” he whispered.
The remark surprised even more alertness into Donati’s already shining eyes. “He’s been studying! Eh?”
“I looked that one up this morning,” Dante admitted. “I wanted to say it to you, because it’s true.”
“You’re a fine boy, Dante,” the opera singer said, tightening his grip. “A fine boy.”
“Don’t be too quick to judge.”
“Not at all.” Donati let go his hug and looked at him. “So long as you don’t forget what that other, slightly more well known Dante wrote in his Paradiso.”
“Tell me.”
“’The pious man may fall, and the thief may rise.’”
“Ouch. If that’s true then what does it mean to be good?” He was thinking of Sunny as he spoke, who always acted as if she already knew the answer was nothing.
But Donati held a different view. “It means that you care,” he said, “even if others do not. Even if”—he took a moment to cross himself—“God does not.”
“Don’t go losing your faith on me, Mr. Donati. One of us needs to be strong.”
“Never say that last part to a man in a wheelchair.”
“Sorry. I lost my head.” Rather than let the comment lead them into his strange goings on of late, Dante decided to change the subject. For help he looked out the window. The view, however, was pitiful as he’d imagined. Brown grass and drab, dead trees. “You need a walk in the park,” he told Donati, frowning at the pre-Christmas dreary.
The other laughed. “My doctor said the same thing.”
Ah, now here was something they could talk about—something so obvious, in fact, that Dante nearly missed it. “What happened?” he asked.
Donati shrugged as if the story were too boring to tell. “My chest was hurting,” he said. “I thought it was indigestion, until it got so bad I could barely walk. So I called an ambulance.”
“And what did the doctors find?”
“Atherosclerosis. Hopefully mild. I don’t want to be cut open.”
“Does it hurt now?”
“Not at all; in fact I’m getting hungry. When do they serve lunch in this mausoleum?”
“That’s a heck of a word to use—“
At that moment the door clicked, and a nurse came in with a tray of food. Donati rolled directly to it, running over Dante’s foot in the progress.
“Whoa!” the nurse—a young lady—exclaimed. “You must be hungry today!”
“Indeed I am, Miss,” Donati replied. “And what do we have?” He made a face at the tray. “Fish and fruit. Bah.”
“Now now,” the nurse chided, “look where your western diet has gotten you.”
“But I need my cappuccino! I need my brioche!”
Dante watched from the window, amused by this miniature drama. The nurse told Donati that he would see nothing of sugared coffee or ice cream in bread whilst a patient at her particular hospital, to which the opera singer went on to proclaim misunderstanding, mistreatment, and—dare he need use the word—cruelty.
“Everything on this plate will make you strong,” the nurse promised.
She left without hearing anything more. Feeling safer now the battle was over, Dante strolled to the bed. The fish didn’t look so bad; it smelled even better. When he told Donati as much the old man grunted, then proceeded to wolf the entire meal like the glutton he’d been at number 114.
“Good boy!” Dante cheered.
“Yes Father, but where’s my ice cream?”
There was a remote control on the bed-stand. Dante picked it up, only to have Donati immediately wave him off.
“Oh no, no,” he said. “No television, please. I’m already grouchy.”
“Did you hear that storm last night?”
Once the words were out he regretted saying them. Here lay a path that would stray back to Sunny, whom Dante, though he didn’t know why, felt hesitant to discuss this morning.
“Slept,” Donati grumbled. “Slept and dreamed.”
“About what?”
“A girl. Lovely creature. Tall and skinny. Short black hair.”
The opera singer paused to knock back the last of a glass of chocolate milk. When he put the glass down his eyes wandered to the bed as if the girl in question might be found beneath its sheets, beckoning for company.
Dante put the remote down. “Real or total fantasy?” he asked.
And Donati, still eyeing the bed: “Oh, real. Very real. I gave her singing lessons last spring. A very windy, stormy April that was. Perhaps the storm you mentioned took my mind back.”
The wheelchair creaked as suddenly he began to rise. Dante made a move to help but once more was waved off. The opera singer climbed into bed and lay back with a sigh towards the ceiling. It wasn’t a sad sigh. To Dante it sounded rather happy—the expelled breath of one recalling better times. Memories that scratched behind the ear.
Dante found a chair and dragged it to the bed. From here he wasn’t certain how to proceed. Would Donati tell him more about the girl? Would it be wise to listen, considering the possibility he might blurt something about Sunny?
“Keefer was her name,” Donati said, without provocation. “Trixie Keefer. A perky, pretty, sunny girl. Blue eyes. Big smile. Full of life.”
“Sunny,” Dante said, then slapped a hand over his mouth.
The opera singer didn’t notice. He went on speaking, his eyes on the blank TV, his mind in the recent past.
“We met at a little restaurant on West Main. She was waitressing tables. I’m not sure how she found out about my singing, but when she did, she asked for lessons.”
“When was that?”
“It must have been February,” Donati sighed. “I remember it was snowing outside. Big, white flakes, like the kind that falls on the Furka Pass. She asked, and I said yes without even quoting a price. That spooky old house of mine needed some sunshine, and Miss Keefer had plenty.” He looked at Dante. “She did pay me, of course. Just not in coin. A waitress doesn’t have coins to dole out for singing lessons. No. She cleaned the house. Did my laundry. Cooked. Chased solicitors away from the door.”
To Dante that sounded like a wife. He said this out loud to Donati, who nodded and replied: “She was my wife. For three months. In fact she’d only been gone a few days when I first met you. She was a good student. A good singer. A good housekeeper.”
Here the singer hesitated and turned his head away. Sensing he had more to say, Dante waited.
“And a good lover,” Donati told the wall. “You might think any girl would be a good lover for a man my age, but I haven’t always been old, or fat, and I have traveled the world.” Sighing, he turned his gaze back to Dante. “Anyway, you’re too young to hear about lovers, good or bad.”
“I’m thirteen.”
A look of surprise took hold the other’s face. “Already?”
“July thirteenth,” Dante said.
“Mamma Mia!”
Laughing now, Dante countered the generic expression with one of his own: “That’s-a spicy meatball!”
“It is indeed! Still, thirteen is too young for…you know. This sort of talk.”
“My girlfriend is twelve and she acts like she’s raring to rip.”
“Girls mature faster than boys. They walk balance beams where we fall. Their compass needles point to poles we cannot explore. When is her birthday, by the way?”
With an inner wince (he had tripped up and mentioned Sunny, just as he’d feared) Dante told him it was March fifteenth.
“Going to marry her?” Donati asked with a grin.
“I thought you said I’m too young for this sort of talk.”
“I’m sick in a hospital bed. My mind is foggy.”
“You’ll get strong again.”
“Yes,” the singer agreed. “For awhile at least. But there’s an adage that goes we’re only young once. That once is long gone for me whether I get well again or not.”
Watching Donati’s sad eyes, Dante tried to get his mind around how his friend felt. It was tricky business. Like a man at dawn imagines what it might be like to harvest at dusk, so being old felt to Dante. The very idea was little more than a dream, remote and surreal. A city in the skies of a foggy sea. From the deck of his freshly launched vessel he could only nod with puzzled expression, which Donati, though a bit dreamy himself, somehow noticed and, to reassure the mirage was anything but, repeated:
“One time only, Dante. From that viewpoint young love is not at all perverse. Rather, it is almost necessary, lest we miss out on beauty, on vigor. But keep in mind when the storms come, you’ll have a more difficult time staying afloat on the water. Or,” he added, as if in response to unheard objection, “perhaps the strength of youth will make it easier. What do I know?”
“Did you have these thoughts when you were with your student?” Dante put forth.
“No, no,” the other said with an impatient sniff. “I merely enjoyed her company.”
“That may be all you needed to do.”
“Maybe.” He looked at Dante. “In any case, my enjoyment with Miss Keefer ended when she graduated high school. Her family is currently vacationing in Key Biscayne.”
“They’ll come back,” Dante said.
“In time for her college courses to resume, yes.”
“You’ll still get to see her.”
“I’m not certain that’s wise. She told me a frightening story one night about a girlfriend of hers who disappeared. Left school one spring and went wandering. In late August she came home with a boyfriend. She was pregnant.”
“It sounds like she eloped,” Dante said. “I’ve heard of girls doing that before.”
Donati gave a nod. “She later told Trixie that she did indeed elope. To a far away place where someone she loved was murdered.”
Dante’s eyes widened. Here was a twist he would never have guessed in a million years. “I’m not sure I follow,” he said to Donati.
“Apparently a wild animal attacked the friend’s mother and…killed her. Murdered, I suppose, wasn’t quite the word to use. But when the friend came home with the father of her child, someone else followed. That someone broke into their home. He attacked all three.”
“Why on Earth did he do that?”
“Miss Keefer doesn’t know for certain. But her friend—Ingrid, her name was—intimated a revenge connection having to do with a family squabble. Two families squabbling, I should say. At any rate, the attack was brutal and bloody. This interloper punched Ingrid’s boyfriend in the chest so hard that his hand went through and pulverized the heart.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dante cut in. “No one could do that. This Keefer girl must have been having fun with you.”
“She gave me the address of the home where it happened. And when. October, 1990.”
“And did you check up on it?” Dante had to ask, though he felt he knew the answer already.
“Yes,” Donati replied softly. “The address is in Sandusky. Two years ago a young man was murdered there. Police responding to an anonymous phone call—presumably from Ingrid—found his bloody body in the kitchen. His breastbone had been smashed. His heart crushed.”
“But Ingrid made it out okay?”
“The police eventually detained her. She answered a lot of questions. They must have been good answers, because she wasn’t arrested. With a little more time she may have been, but…”
Here Donati’s voice trailed off. As before, Dante decided to wait rather than prod for more information. Seconds later the gambit once again paid off.
“She disappeared,” the singer finished. “Vanished. Nobody could find her. Not even Trixie.”
“And she’s still gone?”
“As far as I know.”
Dante sat quietly by the bed. He could think of nothing to say. If the story were true this was the first he’d ever heard of it. That meant nothing, of course. In 1990 he’d only been eleven years old. Rarely had he paid much attention to the news. Even today he sometimes struggled to keep up.
“Ingrid and her boyfriend were a strange couple,” Donati said. “So Trixie told me. One was an introverted artist, the other an unconfident, gauche everyman. Trixie and I were also strange. Were we ever. She was eighteen and me fifty-two.”
“Yep,” Dante had to agree on the second count. “That’s out there all right.”
But the singer hadn’t finished yet. There was one more couple he wanted stirred into the fray.
“You and this Sunny,” he said, smiling from the hospital pillows. “Improbable. Most improbable.”
“How so?”
And as cold water enfeebles the colors on a fresh painted canvas, so did the thought of Sunny weaken Donati’s smile. “I encouraged your relationship at first, but she seems…cruel,” he said. “A girl given over to the infliction of pain.” His eyes flicked from the ceiling to Dante. “Why would you love such a creature?”
“I don’t love her,” Dante said, or tried to say. His voice was barely more than a whisper.
“You said once that you did. And it’s true. It’s in your eyes when you speak her name. And your voice.” Here Donati let his smile return full force. “Your voice becomes music.”
“Stop it.”
“You’re blushing.”
“It’s the heat. They’ve got it cranked too high.”
“Do you still plan to write that letter she asked you to write? The one you told me about after Thanksgiving?”
“Yes. In fact I’ve already written it. It’s a poem.”
“And the deed is done?”
“What deed?”
“You wanted to humiliate two innocent children,” Donati said patiently. Then, just as patiently: “Or did you?”
“It’s just a little prank,” Dante said. “But no. That hasn’t happened. Yet.”
“Second thoughts?”
“Orchestration. Timing.”
“Don’t do it, boy. It won’t be funny. At best it will be awkward; the school will blink in confusion and move on with the year, forgetting it all. At worst…”
Dante leaned forward. “Yes?” he asked, genuinely curious about the older man’s eyes, which to his utter surprise appeared ready to weep.
“At worst, souls will be destroyed. The girl’s. The boy’s. The boy’s in particular. He stands before a tsunami. And yours, Dante,” the singer added. “We mustn’t forget yours. Pain can be like light, and its target a mirror.”
“Unless the mirror breaks,” Dante said. “Then I won’t have to worry.”
“Is that what you want? Good Heavens, boy.”
“No. No, of course not. I was thinking of Sunny.”
“If those are the thoughts she puts in your head,” Donati told him with furled brow, “consider another for the flowers you buy. Girls like Sunny don’t destroy souls, Dante.”
“No?” Dante said, perking up at this bit of optimism.
Donati, however, hadn’t veered down any gilded paths, as his next words proved.
“No,” he said. “They eat them.”