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Dr. Zhivago . . .

Over the hospital’s paging system the three pranksters sent their solemnly urgent voices along the corridors and into the wards, imbuing each name with a reverential depth.

Dr. Jekyll . . .

They were actors and playwrights, these three, Angela and Dan and Lew, social workers only temporary, offering their wit as a lightening agent to the dread air in this formidable row of faded-brick buildings, grime the mortar. Out of place, this row—it belonged in another part of the country, more north, more east, under slanting rain in Seattle or slashed by cold winds in Chicago or on that penal island off New York, someplace where the weathers punish the inmates even more.

Yet here it was, in San Francisco’s warmest neighborhood and only a short walk from the broad grassy slopes and flourishing trees of Dolores Park where, on Sundays in summer, their troupe, their quick-change dozen actors, set up their shaky stage and satirized the times with their outrageous comedies, their own Commedia dell’Arte, come alive again now in the Sixties. Their high-flung voices, along with the noises they made that thumped and banged on the neighborhood doors, might even have reached the hospital’s murky windows, sounding within like the mutterings inside the head of the patient in the next bed.

Dan held a master’s in political science and Lew a bachelor of arts in drama, but Angela, a small-time, odd-job actress, bold on stage but not as herself, had no degree whatsoever.

“Say you do,” Dan insisted. “Give yourself an M.S. in sociology and a B.A. in psychology. Imagine you’re speaking the truth. You do it all the time on stage.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll last,” she said.

“Nobody knows that,” said Lew. “They’re all wondering the same thing in there.”

“I mean I may not last more than a couple of days.”

Angela Anson, her name in a plastic badge on her blouse, confidante without credentials, passed up and down the women’s ward, telling those on her list where they’d be going, what haven with its ominously pretty name or the bed that was waiting at home, whether longed for or not.

Unlike the men’s ward where, she was told, men cursed and struck the air and straggled out into the halls on their thwarted way home, this women’s ward was a quiet one. Three long rows of beds, one row along each long wall and one row along the back and, on overcrowded days, another row down the center. Narrow beds with rails that went up and down, white sheets sliding on rods for each woman’s very own curtains when the doctors came by. Earthquake-prone, each morning the women’s ward appeared to have undergone a quake in the night. The row of beds down the center gone, or the back row gone, and the shocked atmosphere like that after a quake. What’s happening here? The question on each face upon a pillow. A quake of the mind, a quake of the heart.

Dr. Curie . . . Dan’s good morning to Angela.

“Bad dreams at night,” she’d told him. “My mother berating me for what? It must be because I never knew enough about her. She may have wanted to unfold herself for me and never could. Their lives must be unfolding before their eyes, in there, and they’re unfolding mine. They’re unfolding me. Do you know what I mean?”

Dan said he sort of knew. So she was . . . Dr. Curie . . . discoverer of so much that was undetectable and that might not even exist.

Her step, always a light step, was even lighter here, a step for museums and churches, sanctified places that always made her feel unworthy. The county hospital is not a holy place, Dan said, and you were not hired for the role of St. Teresa of Avila. She kissed the lepers’ lesions and that’s not in your line of duty. Her step was light for another reason. She wished to disappear from this unfolding scene as the women did, overnight, two, three, or an entire row at a time, gone to places called home or gone for reasons unknown to her, and as the interns also disappeared and were replaced by lookalikes.

The illustrious doctors, long dead or never alive, whom Dan and Lew were calling for, seemed more solidly in person than these young interns who stepped from bed to narrow bed, graceless, at a loss, not yet adept in the presence of women in their beds, maybe any woman in any bed, anywhere. Dan called these interns by their first names, drank coffee with them, gave them his dissident view of Vietnam, and, more often than not, he was the one calling for the imaginary doctors, convinced they’d be around long after the real ones, the sleep-deprived, baffled fledglings, were gone a thousand times over.

An Audience of One who never blinked. They had to imagine that God was watching, or that’s what Angela had to imagine for them, these women in this pale ward, so they’d not be overlooked. So many persons in rows—it was a common enough sight across the world in Vietnam, on the television screens that seemed invented for just that repetition of wars and disasters that laid people out in rows. Over the other scenes there was always a terrible struggle in the air, but in this women’s ward there was a yielding to whoever was watching over them and to the medication that must seem like a persuasive stranger entering their most intimate being for their own good. What an unbearably rude intrusion, then—Angela appearing at bedside to tell them where they’d be going next.

“Where?”

This one, this woman, fifty, pink-champagne hair, must have run away from home at nine and kept on running away. The nights of her life on a barstool till 2:00 a.m. and the last hours of the morning with a newfound friend, down in the dubious comfort of his bed. A chic hat and a string of pearls and a job, all that to begin, and then the nylons bagging at the knees and ankles and the high heels bending inward.

“Where?”

“Laguna Honda.” And Angela saw this woman’s face draw up from her frightened heart a small girl’s look of daring to flee.

Laguna Honda. Like a monastery, like a huge echoing nunnery on a hill, it belonged in Spain in the Middle Ages. With a tower, and within the tower a dim-lit archway, the only light above the thick black trees whenever Angela drove past at night. She drove fast around the curve to escape her imagining of pale faces floating on deep black waters.

“You can’t do that. My daughter won’t let you.”

Every day this mother promised the appearance of the daughter, but the daughter wasn’t showing up yet. Wasn’t it glib to say that the daughter was abandoning the mother because the mother had abandoned the child? A child belongs to the world—that was Angela’s explanation. But if this woman was her mother she’d come and stand at this bedside just as she was doing now and just as she’d appeared by her mother’s bed in another ward in another city. Your heart sinks down with your mother’s, Angela said to the daughter who wasn’t there. Your heart sinks down and leaves your breast and may never come back. But when you’re out in the street again it comes racing back, bursting with grief.

Angela said, “My supervisor is still hoping a bed will turn up somewhere else.” Oh, God, did she say turn up? There was no way of saying it to ease the fear of the next bed. “More where you’d like.”

“No bed in this goddamn world is where I’d like.”

Later that day Angela caught sight of her in a curtained-off section, her face shocked by what her limbs were doing without her consent, trying to run away with her as she’d run away before, over and over. Withdrawal from alcohol, Lew explained. It never leaves the body without a terrible lovers’ quarrel.

Dr. Faustus . . . Dr. Faustus . . .

At her back now, the woman to whom she listened evasively sideways, head bowed, unable to come face to face.

“I beg you.”

Nod, Angela, nod, and listen with one ear.

“I beg you, please ask the doctor to let me go home.”

That voice, a trembling thread trying to get itself through the eye of a needle. Angela had heard it before, years ago.

“I’ll ask again.”

That arrogant doctor, that one with the impatiently jiggling knee, the disposing gaze—he was the one Angela had asked. Why had she picked him? To humanize him, when she ought to turn her full gaze upon this pleading woman and humanize herself.

She did. She looked into the woman’s eyes and came face to face with her own Aunt Ida. That’s who this woman was, after twenty years, up from that bed in the Home for those who were never to leave. Way back on the stage of her childhood, there was Aunt Ida in bed, white hair boy’s cut, the thinnest wrists, the scarcest voice, the largest, darkest eyes, and there was Angela’s mother in the visitor’s chair, smartly clad even though the cloche hat and Cuban heels were already ten years worn, and there was Angela, five years old, plaid skirt, black patent-leather pumps, born entertainer, reciting the tale of that terrible battle between Ivan Skvinsky Skzar and Abdul Abulbul Amir, the threats, the oaths, the blows. There was little Angela at bedside, unable to believe what her mother had told her, that Ida had been the most beautiful of the five sisters, and here was Angela now, unable to believe that this woman at her elbow had ever been other than who she was now, had ever been young, a girl, twelve, sixteen, eighteen, in that flowering time.

From her very first hours in the ward she had tried to picture them when they were young, wanting to come to their rescue by reviving them as girls again. Oh, such lovely girls! Wanting to do for them what she hadn’t done for her Aunt Ida.

“I try to imagine them when they were girls, but I can’t,” she told the head nurse, Nancy, and the nurse, already verging into that same anonymity of aging, turned her head for Angela to see her deliberately uncomprehending face. “Why would you ever think to do that anyway?”

Dr. Mabuse . . . Dan’s voice.

Dr. Mabuse, that decadent doctor, dispenser of opium, was calling her to join him for a coffee break in the cafeteria.

“Were you ever in Pere Lachaise cemetery?” she asked him.

“You mean have I risen?”

Dan, so healthy, his cheeks childishly rosy, his hair darkly shiny, the kindest heart, the hardest head, wrote a crackling political column for an underground weekly.

“My year in Paris, my Marceau mime time, I wandered around in there,” she said.

“Gravely there?”

“Colette’s monument resembles a bed.”

“Nights, does she romp around on it?”

“Afternoons, too,” she said. “Maybe beds are where women belong. Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else’s, whether it’s night or day, whether they want to be or not. That’s where the blame lies for some infamous messes. Take that bed of Hamlet’s mother, for example, or Desdemona’s, because that’s where Iago saw her in his fired-up imagination, a high-born slut, sleeping with a blackamoor. I could go on and on. You persuaded me to ask for a job in this place and now you can listen to the consequences. Now I see women as inseparable from their beds.”

“Bedded down in eternity?”

“Could you see that goes on my tombstone? On second thought, I don’t want a stone over me. I never want to be confined. So just wrap me in my cloth coat, forget the ermine, and leave me out on some high mountain.”

Dr. Freud . . . please . . .

Overnight, a girl lying in the narrow bed made narrower just by youth’s full size and restlessness. Dark, tumbled curls, a broad face, paled and alarmed by the pumping out of that handful of pills from where they’d settled in for a long night. Off to the psych ward at the end of the day, she was no concern of Angela’s.

“Please, Miss,” as Angela walked by. “I’m not allowed to go to the lavatory and the nurse won’t come.”

Angela handed up the bedpan, defying whatever rule there might be that forbade a social worker this act of mercy. Struggling out from under the covers, the girl sat awkwardly down on the pan, atop the bed, large, long legs bared and bent.

“Lie down, lie down,” Angela urged. “You do it lying down. Under the covers.” And the girl went awkwardly under, probably awkward at all of life’s necessary acts, suicide among them.

Angela put the bedpan under the bed and stayed on, wanting to ask outright: Why did you want to die? Knowing there was no answer that could be brought to the surface by a stranger at bedside or even by a social worker with honest credentials who’d ask the same question in cleverly curative ways. Angela Anson had had no simple answer, either, and wasn’t asked, because nobody knew about her attempt. A skinny sixteen, awkward at everything and even at how to hope, she was saved by that very awkwardness, and she wanted to say to this girl: After that bungled act I left my awkwardness behind, and now I remember it sort of fondly, like I would a crazy childhood girlfriend.

Dr. Freud . . . Lew telling Angela that the hour was near for a visit to the psychiatric ward. She’d asked him about it. Could she peek in for a minute to see where that girl was going?

Somewhere in another of the grim buildings she slipped into the entry of that ward. The very small entry, the only place allowed her, had space enough for the Judge, a large, high-chested fellow in a finely tailored suit, the three men in gray-drab, depleted by fear of their own minds’ doings and trying not to slump, and barely enough for herself.

The Judge’s voice was cleaving its way through the soiled air, asking legalese questions and informing each of his destination, which asylum, what refuge. Like a scene in any number of plays, where an assassin or a priest comes to tell the prisoner what his future looks like, this was a scene in a debtors’ prison for those who couldn’t pay back all that civilizing invested in them. She’d been in even closer proximity to this Judge. A wedding reception at the Stanford Court Hotel atop Nob Hill, where she’d carried trays loaded with prawns and oysters up to that buttoned-up belly.

Over in a few minutes, this orderly dispersal of the deranged. The Judge left and she followed at a discreet distance, noting his brisk sort of shuffle, a slight uncertainty of step that came from sitting in judgment for so many years. If she were ever to play a high-court judge on the stage in the park, she’d stuff a bed pillow vertically down her front and take those small steps, the uncertainty in the head repressed all the way down to the feet.

Dr. Caligari . . .

Only an illusion, that this woman was a dwarf. Recovered now, she was going home this hour, and all Angela had to do was walk along beside her in that enforced wheelchair ride to the exit and beside the slouchy orderly doing the pushing. Angela thought dwarf because of her theatrical tendency to recognize types from bygone centuries, and dwarfs seemed of a time of mass deprivation. This woman in the wheelchair, her gray hair stubble-cut, was deprived. A cleaning woman, she’d fainted on the job—pneumonia—and they’d had to bring her son along since there was no one else to take care of him while his mother was away. So many hiding places in the city, you never could know what went on in them until someone was brought out and then maybe went back in again.

Hop-skipping down the corridor toward them, impeding their progress, a young doctor, an intense one, hair askew.

“Let me see your hands.”

Angela’s hands began to rise, palms forward. Was there some new scan that doctors had, a scientific palmistry for detecting liars and impostors and actors?

The young hyperactive doctor was bending toward the woman in the wheelchair, whose hands lay humbly in her lap, blunt hands, curved to the shape of mop handles, vacuum cleaner handles. She uncurled them under his scrutiny.

“Can you tell me,” he asked, “why your son has six fingers?”

The woman’s eyes were shifting along at floor level.

“My mother cursed us.”

“Who?” Wobbling off his track.

“They cursed us.”

Dazedly stepping aside, the young doctor allowed them to proceed down the corridor, the orderly pushing, Angela guiding.

At the side portal they waited for the son to be brought from the adjacent building and for another social worker who was to convey mother and son back to their rooms. Out from the other building and down the path, the son was being swiftly borne toward his mother, the orderly mockingly happy to be pushing the wheelchair of this mute density of a man with two fingers too many. A rough spot on the pavement and off he flies, this son, onto the lawn where he lies docile, waiting to be lifted.

Dr. Caligari . . . please . . .

Lew, responding to her call, showed up in the women’s ward and escorted her out into the air, around a corner where she’d never been. Lew, whose long face knew everything before it was told him, listened to her anyway.

“Doctors don’t know what they’re getting into when they get to be doctors,” she told him. “How could she know why her son’s got that extra little finger alongside his proper one? One finger too many, or two too many, it’s just a clue to what goes on in the dark where your life gets twisted into the weirdest shape before you’re even born. Suppose he came into the women’s ward and asked them why they’re in there. They’d say, like, Oh, sure, Doctor, my old man beat me up, or my lung collapsed, or I was hit by a trolley. They’d see he was simpleminded and they’d answer him like that, because how can you say to a doctor, My karma hurts me?”

“Lower your voice.”

“I don’t care who hears.”

“Never take a deep breath in there,” he cautioned. “Take it every morning before you go in. You’ve lasted how many days? Six already? But be warned.”

Lower your voice, take no deep breaths, step softly, and you’ll be fine. When she caught the old Gypsy woman watching her, Angela flashed an impersonal smile as proof that she knew what she was doing in that ward. The Gypsy woman was sitting up in bed after three days under covers and her own matriarchal bed was awaiting her return. A Gypsy queen, ninety-six years old. Over her bony face a blending of gold leaf and copper, her sea-green eyes sunken under mole-brown lids. Around her head a kerchief, blue and red. No resemblance to the Gypsies who went up and down the train in Spain, the tiny mother and her daughter who might have been sixteen or six, begging their way. This one must have eaten very well, this one must have wrung the necks of hundreds of fat chickens and pulled out big handfuls of feathers. Fear wasn’t her bedmate here, Faith was and probably had always been, keeping her heart beating for so long.

Shrewdly, she was gazing at Angela as at someone who could be ensnared by flattery. After a while she beckoned.

“Give me your hand.”

On your way back into life, do you fit yourself into who you were always expected to be, for a safe return? The very thin, limp hand, covered with brown patches like islands on an old sepia chart, turned over Angela’s hand, and Angela’s palm lay open to the future like a part of herself that hadn’t been attended to as it ought to have been, considering its potential.

“A long life.”

That index finger, its knuckle like an ancient tarnished coin, traced a line so slowly it seemed a very long way, pausing where that high road was joined or crossed by low roads, by roads not taken, and by roads down which hitchhikers came to thumb a ride. Not until she’d stepped into this ward had she begun to trouble herself over the span of her life, and now she was being told what she didn’t want to know after all.

“You are a wayward girl?”

Wayward? That word wasn’t around anymore. It belonged to old-time bawdy music hall skits. If she was wayward, it must be evident enough without her palm revealing it. Unlike the nurses, so trim, so starched and white, combed and capped, Angela was artfully indifferent, her dark hair untamable, her fingernails clean but their polish chipped, her blouse clean and ironed but with one button sewn back on with an unmatching thread, black kohl all around her eyes, a cheap ring from Chinatown on one finger and an even cheaper ring from a street fair on a little finger. Anyone could spot her for a working hippie, a counterculture actress, a wayward girl.

“I’m an actress,” smiling like one.

Mockery now in the glintless eyes. Was mockery, too, a life-renewing pleasure? “Actresses like jewels? Yes? Yes, I know, yes. Tomorrow my children will bring my jewels for you.” The mockery grasping back that gift of a long life, the giving and the taking away all in one breath.

Under the covers again the next morning, the Gypsy woman was identified only by the colored kerchief. Out of the corner of her eye Angela saw this flattening down and felt some shameful relief from that gaze. Kept most of the day at her desk in the row of social workers’ cubicles, she did not come up to the ward until late afternoon.

Oh, God, what a handsome lot they were, that woman’s children. Or grandchildren. Seven of them, gathered at the bed. Visitors—friends, pastors, relatives, nuns—came around in the evening hours, but here was this Gypsy family in the afternoon. Unreal, their garments biblically splendid as that coat of many colors, and all with golden skin. They were her children of whatever generation, and all to live as long as the mother.

The bed was empty.

“Candles. Can you bring candles?” a daughter asked, and a son said, “Please. Candles,” a singer’s sorrowing voice.

Candles? She went in search. None in the nurses’ station. No candles in the desk of the social worker on vacation, now known as Angela’s desk. Drawers she hadn’t opened before held only a coffee mug, a quicky-glance mirror, breath sweeteners, postcards, and in the larger, bottom drawer, a pair of high-heeled pumps to wear on dinner dates. Only two of the bona fide social workers were still at their desks, and they shook their heads. No candles, and they asked no reason for candles. Maybe the lights had gone out in the lavatory.

A cubbyhole grocery store was near, a few minutes’ walk away. No candles there. Sold out. Candles were a necessity in every friend’s apartment. Round as oranges, long as tapers, and ordinary ones, the soft light of the flame intensifying the marijuana mood.

When she returned, empty-handed, the archangelic children were gone.

*  *  *  *  *

Night in her own bed, the bed she was sure to remember as the one in this period of her life, lying beside her lover whose bed it was, too, she wondered if those women ever wondered about her, about where her bed was and whether she shared it and with whom. If wonder and curiosity were signs of life, she’d give them a boost back into life by telling them some things about herself while waiting for sleep.

Listen, my dear alones, over there across the city. Do you remember how each time you lay yourself down in a bed you wondered, if even for a moment, what you were doing there? And what about the beds you thought you’d chosen yourself ? Do they now seem chosen for you? Destiny’s hand patting them down. Lie here, lie here. God must surely have created beds for sharing, for most of mine were shared and see the ways you’ve shared yours, given your children to hold dearly close and given your mates and your lovers. And maybe that’s why a bed of solitude is so sweet, so sweet, if it’s only for a while and not forever. And even if it’s forever, I don’t know that yet. Tonight I’m lying beside a man, a friend, who is as much in need as myself of a friend to lie down with, make love with, share the rent with, share soup with, break bread with, and lie down with again. Over against the wall, his side, is a large orange acrylic nude, because he’s an art student and large nudes promise largeness of future and fortune, as always. This bed, if you want to know, is sprinkled with those tiny pellets of lint that never get to form in your beds, and it’s in a very small concrete apartment, a basement apartment that’s next to the boiler room, if a boiler is that monster hot water tank that supplies steamy hot water to the tenants on the six floors above, and through the night that tank heats up all of a sudden, over and over, with a rush and a roar, scaring me out from under my camouflage of sleep and unheard by my bedmate. I remember that first bed ever where I lay beside a lover. It was a bed I didn’t know was there, it was just a wall in a darkened apartment, and out it came and down, like a meaning unfolding in that time when so many meanings were unfolding and I was just fourteen. Oh, then there was the bed in that home for unwed mothers, the Crittenden it was called, a name like a chastising ruler, but really a kind place, a big brick building as ancient as Laguna Honda and the place where you are tonight. A man comes to sit by his mother’s bed every afternoon. Have you noticed him? Fifty, but resembles a fawn, wears a suit, a tie, places his hat on his knees. A gentle man, a fine son, and the head nurse Nancy is in love with him. I won’t be mortally wounded when the son I gave life to sits someday by the bed of a mother who’s not me. Old mothers in their beds all look the same. Some night, some day, there’ll be Angela Anson herself in your row, and what will I say to soften the heart of the social worker who I’ll dislike at first sight? Why, I’ll say I was an actress with a flair for comedy, even called delightful in the theater section of the Sunday papers, even called delectable, and I’ll know as I tell her, if I tell her, that she won’t believe a word of it. I’ll say I’d thought an actress had a special kind of destiny, a beneficent role to play, bringing to life a lot of other women. Maybe, to amuse her, I’ll tell her about the pranks we played, Dan and Lew and myself, calling for those doctors who were so real for us and unreal for everybody else. And if she’s not amused, I’ll tell her, whether it’s true or not, that Dan became a high-class political columnist, syndicated, and Lew a drama professor at a prestigious university, but I won’t tell her that all my stages were small ones, if that’s true for me. I’ll say all that, hoping in my heart, my frightened heart, that I’ve persuaded her not to drop me off into that black lagoon. Oh, my dears, have you ever heard these lines? I in my bed of thistles, you in your bed of roses and feathers. I thought it meant the other woman’s bed, her bed of roses and feathers, where the lover I’d loved so much was lying, but now I know it means so much more and I’ll tell you why. Just remember the beds where you wished you weren’t and the beds where you wished you were, and then name any spot on this earth that’s a bed for some woman this very hour. A bed of stones and a bed of earth trampled by soldiers and a bed of ashes, and where you’re lying now, where you never wanted to imagine yourselves. If I’d wished for a bed of roses and feathers, and I did, I did, now I don’t want it so much anymore.

A candle. The candle she’d been looking for was on the table in plain sight, an average one, white, flickering away as candles do, showing her the plates and glasses and paint tubes around it, the clothes on the chair, his orange nude against the wall, Molière’s plays on the bed, the covers over the sleeping man beside her and over herself, not alone and yet alone. If she were to take that candle up to the ward, a light for any woman leaving at any time, even when she herself wouldn’t be there anymore, would that be going too far? An actress, carried away by her role?

*  *  *  *  *

Dr. Curie . . .

Once again, Dan was bidding her a good morning. She heard his voice along the ceiling of the ward as she went up one aisle and down another, carrying the white candle in its wooden holder. In the ward’s daylight its tip of flame was probably not discernible by the women at a distance, but surely they knew the candle was lit and the women who were closest to it knew.

At her back now, Nurse Nancy. “What’s this all about?”

“The Gypsy woman,” said Angela. “Her children asked me to bring a candle.”

“That was yesterday,” said Nurse Nancy, the only nurse with gray hair and whose step was flat, wearier than the other nurses’ steps. “They’ve got their own to-do, whatever they do. They’ve got their own candles.” Searching Angela’s eyes to see if this act confirmed a strangeness within.

“I thought the women might appreciate it,” said Angela.

“The other ladies don’t know she’s gone. They’ve got their own problems.”

And Nurse Nancy blew out the flame, with a breath that failed to be strong and unwavering but did the job anyway.

Lightly, then, a touch at Angela’s elbow and a touch at her back, touches to assist her to stay on her feet and to point her in the right direction. Or were they touches of complicity?