Dear Digby (21 page)

I got the call about four
A.M.
—Iris had put me down as a relative on an “in case of emergency” form, and the head nurse told me I could enter the I.C.U. if I made it in time. I tried, but I didn’t. Though Terence and I staggered out of bed and into our clothes and hit the thruway in record time, they’d taken her body away and Brookheart officials had signed for everything by the time we got to the hospital. I leaned against a pillar just outside the I.C.U. doors, like flotsam washed up by a great murderous swell. After hours in the dark warm car, the bright lights and antiseptic white walls hurt my eyes. Terence took my arm and tried to lead me away, but just then a brown-skinned busy little nurse bustled through the swinging doors of the I.C.U.

She took off her mask. “Are you Willis Digby?” she asked. Her eyes looked like she’d had enough for one night. She handed me a piece of paper. “She couldn’t speak at the end, but she wrote most of these things down—I finished the rest using the letter chart.” She gave me a professional smile. “You know, we hold up the letters and they point to them and spell out words. Anyway, we got it on paper. A last letter to you. It took
forever.”
She touched my arm. “She had a lot to say—and she was
exhausted
at the end. Very short of breath. She just fell asleep.”

“Did you hold her hand?”

“Yes.” She nodded proudly. “I did. She wanted me to hold her ‘real’ hand because it had feeling, and then she asked me to hold the prosthetic hand because she said it might feel left out.”

I looked at the paper, large trembly printing, and then the nurse’s careful script.

Dear Digby,

I’m sorry I put you down as next of kin, but as you know, I have no one else. Willis, I’m not too happy about this, but I talked to God and she said:
You had a long ride on a broke-leg pony, Time to Get Off.
I am pretty tired anyway and it had to come, so please don’t feel too bad and please stand up for me in court okay. You know more than anybody what I wanted to say, and, Willis, please
read
my journal. Also could you visit Nina; she won’t understand what’s happened. Maybe you could visit Danny too. He told me all about you as a kid and make no mistake, Willis, he is one high-style dancer. One last thing: I made up the story about my mother and the ice cream truck, and another: I know I am not beautiful. I am very, very, very ugly. But, Willis, my life was not bad. Read my journal. So forgive me, please. My motto: Don’t backtrack in a snowstorm! Love forever,

Iris

P.S. Just for the record, I do
not
see a bright light that sees into my innermost soul. I see a carton of Häagen-Dazs on the Nurses’ Station counter.

P.P.S. I would like to be buried in my gold running suit and my tie-dyed underpants,
no gravestone.

Finally Terence and I were persuaded (as next of kin) to go down into the bowels of the hospital, to view The Body. But it wasn’t Iris. It was just a grouping of body parts—like fruit arranged for a still life: an empty, stitched, expressionless face, closed eyes, wispy baby-fine colorless hair. One real flesh hand holding a prosthetic hand. It was only when I leaned closer to her that I saw one touching Iris-ism, the odd callouses on the palm flesh of the “good” fingers made by the plastic fingers clutching them for comfort, for relief from the terror and pain of the artificial extremity.

There was a private service on the Brookheart grounds. Iris’s yoga instructor gave a kind of eulogy, and the all-patient orchestra played Don Ho favorites because that was all they knew. There was an altar set up with a photograph of Iris that obscured most of her face, and vases and vases of irises. She had already been buried in the Badger Falls cemetery. She hadn’t wanted a graveside ceremony or gravestone. The patients were decked out in fairly festive attire—there were cowboy hats and plaid yarmulkes and a man in a World War I vintage pilot’s togs, goggles, and an aviator’s scarf, who sobbed and sobbed. Two of the women, who looked like aged twins, wore matching strapless tulle prom gowns with corsages. The dwarflike girl I’d seen at the Crafts Fair wore a miniskirt and saddle shoes and a lace mantilla. Danny The Watcher was there, subdued in a white suit and shades. He waved to me. Nina, who looked the same as always, saw me and also waved; she came up to me after the service and looked right into my eyes. Her face was red and flushed from crying.
“Iris,”
she said and began to shake. “Where is Iris?” I looked for Terence, for help. He was signing autographs for the twin sisters. “Is Iris broken?” she asked.

The Cayman slithered toward us. “Hello.” He smirked. “I’ll take over now.”

“No,
thanks,”
I said and held Nina tighter. “We’re fine.”

Nina frowned at him.
“Hey,”
she cried. “Bug off! This is
our
yard!” She sent a dark look after him.
“Seminal fluid,”
she confided in me.

We drove back to the city in silence. I had Iris’s yucca plant on my lap, her Hot Line princess phone at my feet, and a couple pairs of her tie-dyes in my bag. After a while I fell asleep and dreamed something confused about Lily and Iris; I couldn’t remember it when I woke up. I realized that I still hadn’t managed to think of her as dead. When it was my turn to drive, I saw her once clearly at the side of the road, smiling and waving her plastic hand as we sped past at sixty-five mph, and then I saw nothing for miles and miles and miles.

Back at my apartment, Terence made some coffee in the kitchen, and I sat on the couch in the living room and shook out the sealed plastic bag of Iris’s personal effects they’d given me. It contained Iris’s polyurethane hospital I.D. bracelet with her blue-stenciled admission date, her name and social security number. The bracelet was tiny, infant-sized; it had been stapled around her prosthetic wrist. She had also brought with her a small stuffed animal—a monkey (made from a sock) with ripped arms and legs, a battered, stitched mouth, and one button eye hanging by a thread. There were a few bottles of pills for various frightening physical ailments: anticoagulants, heartbeat regulators, Dilantin for seizures, nitroglycerine capsules. Finally, there was her wallet. It was rawhide leather, with hand-tooled cowboy curlicues and horses’ heads. Inside there was her social security number, an I.D. card that listed me as an emergency contact, four intimidating medical information cards—and one photograph. It fell free from the dusty clear plastic it had rested behind for a long time—a three-by-five album snapshot from the early days of color film, late fifties maybe. It looked like a tiny neorealist painting: The grass was too green, the sky too blue. A pretty woman in her late twenties with bright red hair and dark eyes knelt on the grass in the front yard of a neat brick house, her arm around the little girl of five or so standing next to her. The woman smiled with such determined energy at the camera that she appeared in pain. The little girl was more restrained. She wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and white shorts and sandals. Her strawberry-blond hair fell to her waist in soft curls, her eyes were large and brown, her lovely five-year-old mouth was turned up in an unequivocal smile, but she ducked her head: She was shy. I recognized the clear intent of that face to fulfill its beauty, the humorous entreaty in those eyes. I kept the photo in front of me for a long time. Then I grasped that Terence was talking to me, taking the snapshot from my hand, holding it under the lamplight, grasped that I had been crying for a long time, that the child was gone now. Iris Moss was dead.

I
T WAS THE
second week of the Brookheart trial. The D.A. had indicted and formally charged five Brookheart staff members, including Basil Schrantz, on fifteen counts of sexual misconduct, assault, and rape. When I testified, I read Iris’s letters aloud, and I recounted, in detail, her visit to me at SIS. The hypodermic needle was produced by Mr. Dorchek, the Assistant D.A. He asked me what it was, and I said it was the needle used to sedate Iris. The defense attorney, Mr. Brickmann, objected, and the objection was upheld. There was some discussion of prejudicing the jury, and I stood corrected—it was the hypodermic needle that Iris Moss had
told me
Basil Schrantz had used to sedate her. My testimony proceeded in a similar vein—me quoting Iris, the defense table qualifying Iris.

Mr. Brickmann cross-examined me. “Miss Digby, you
do
know that the recently deceased Iris Moss was a diagnosed victim of personality disorders who suffered occasional hallucinations? Dr. Rollo Bush, head of staff at Brookheart, described her in a routine case history file as ‘incorrigible’ and ‘occasionally aggressive.’ He says (and I quote): ‘At times her seizures produced in her a euphoria and loquaciousness similar to that experienced by manic-depressives.’”

I said, “I did not know that Dr. Bush had used those particular adjectives to describe Iris, and I am not an expert on human psychology, but I
can
venture an opinion about why she might have seemed aggressive in his company. I spent ten minutes chatting with him, and his condescending manner made me want to wring his neck.” The patients all laughed, and the Cayman, in the third row, glared savagely at me.

“Well, you and Ms. Moss must have made quite a pair. Ms. Moss recently shot someone while visiting you in your apartment, am I correct?”

“Yes, you are,” I said, as Dorchek leaped up to object. “She was trying to save my life, as the New York Police Department and the newspapers have so clearly documented. If someone had broken into
your
apartment and held
you
hostage with a rifle, you’d find such behavior by a friend
heroic,
as I certainly did.”

At a later point in the cross-examination, he held up a copy of the
Mirror
photograph of me in my tux and rabbit ears and asked me if I recognized it.

“Yes. That’s me.”

“In your
normal
working attire, as we’re given to understand from this newspaper interview, which appeared in the
Mirror”
—he checked the date—“three and a half months ago. In the same interview you state, ‘I’m crazy,’ and you talk about how your column functions as a forum for ‘crazy people.’”

“Yes, but I’d like to say—”

Dorchek objected, to no avail; the judge allowed the defense to proceed.

“And here is a photo of you (again in your rabbit ears) taken on the evening you and some other self-styled urban terrorists physically attacked Robert Hargill, the newscaster, at a Manhattan restaurant. As I understand it, you were carrying a .38 revolver. …”

“Your Honor,” Dorchek said, “I must register my objection once again to this line of questioning—this is character defamation, and it serves no useful purpose in the trial proceedings.”

“Sustained.”

“Thank you, Miss Digby.”

I watched the Cayman smile at me.

Then the patients testified: the boy who made the Playdough Jesus, the dwarfish girl, the prom-dress twins, a man who thought he was Lucky Lindbergh, Nina. They performed brilliantly. They told their brief, brutal stories in clear, un-self-pitying tones. They had been coached carefully by the prosecuting attorneys not to change the subject or become distracted, and for the most part they managed.

On the fourth day of testimony, Nina took the stand. She looked like the Little Match Girl in her patched red coat and boots. The prosecution led her quietly through her paces.

“You said you have been
hurt
sexually—how did this happen?”

“A man touched me; he came into my room at night.”

“Were you afraid?”

She shuddered. “Yes. Afraid. I told him to go.”

“What did the man do?”

“He
hurt
me, he gave me a shot, then he … touched me.

“Did this happen more than once?”

“This was many times, many, many. Since I was fifteen.”

“And how old are you now, Miss Santos?”

“Nineteen.”

“Is the man who came into your room all those times present here in the courtroom today?”

She pointed at one of the night-shift attendants, seated at a table with his lawyers. “That is the man.

“He covered my mouth with his hand and then he hurt me,” she added, but the Assistant D.A. had already turned triumphantly toward the jury.

The cross-examination began. Mr. Brickmann approached the stand. “Miss Santos,” he said, “when you say ‘hurt’ do you mean ‘cause pain’ or some other thing?”

“Hurt,”
she said emphatically. Her brown eyes, beneath her long bangs, searched his, trying to understand.

“Do you mean that someone touched you on the arm,
bumped
you, or pushed you roughly?”

She squinted hard at him, struggling to follow.

He pretended to bump into the courtroom railing. Then he held his knee. “Is this
hurt?”

She looked at him blankly.

“Tell me then, please, what hurt is.” He smiled at her patiently.

He was a large, fatherly, white-haired man, with piercing blue eyes and a hawk nose. An expensive navy-blue pinstripe suit. He had plenty of time.

She pointed through the red coat to her heart.
“Hurt.”

The attorney smiled at her. “Your Honor,” he said, “it seems clear to me that the witness is incapable of distinguishing one type of perceived ‘hurt’ from another. Unintentional rough treatment in the administration of an injection, for example, might seem to her to be a personal aggression, even a sexual aggression.”

Dorchek was on his feet. “Objection, Your Honor! As stated prior to Miss Santos’s testimony, she was born severely retarded, with Down’s syndrome. She has limited powers of expression, approximately third-grade language capability—however, she can understand and communicate adequately if she is not frightened or
led.
I request that this harassment of the witness not be allowed to proceed.”

“Overruled,” said the judge. “But, Counsel, bear in mind that this witness must be addressed in a manner sensitive to her condition.”

The white-haired attorney turned back to Nina—he gave her a dazzling capped smile.

“When the person who came into your room
hurt
you, Miss Santos, can you explain
what
he did to you?
Exactly?”