Deathbed

The plea was redundant. Ethel was already unwinding him.

“How did you ever get tangled up like this?”

“What are you doing here?”

“One thing at a time.” Ethel finally got Bruce into a redeemable position, then ripped off the remainder of the coveralls and threw them in the basket.

Whitaker adjusted his toupee, which had slipped to a devil-may-care angle. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. “

“Me!”

“I knew you were here somewhere.”

“How did you . . .?”

“Oh, Bruce. You want to help me so much. I just knew you’d be here somewhere trying to help me. I just wasn’t sure where I’d find you.”

Still and all, it seemed odd to Whitaker that in the entire hospital, Ethel would have stumbled upon the men’s locker room to search. But this was not the best time to sit around wondering. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Gee, I think that might be the worst thing we could do right now.”

“What?”

“This is a bad time—I mean a bad time to leave. It’s too late to just walk out as if we were part of one of the shifts going off duty. And it’s too early to leave completely unnoticed. Some of the patients get restless about this time and the nurses and the guards are pretty active now. We’d better wait awhile.”

This did not fit into his plan at all. Whitaker was becoming a bit panicky. “Where can we hide?”

“Sometimes the best place to hide is right out in the open.”

“What?”

Ethel removed something from the pocket of her uniform. “Here, take this stethoscope and hang the earpieces around your neck.” She fixed the medical instrument on him. “Like this. Now, put on your white jacket. See, now you’re a doctor. And I’m your nurse. This way, as long as we don’t get too close to anyone, and especially if we don’t meet anybody who knows you, we’ll be able to go anywhere in the hospital until the early hours of the morning. Then we can slip out.”

“You really think so?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just with this stethoscope?”

“When you see someone, particularly a man, in a white coat with a stethoscope, who do you think he is?”

“A doctor.”

Ethel nodded. “And so does everyone else. Come on, let’s go.”

“Huh?”

“One thing’s for sure: We don’t want to stay in here. We’re pinned down. And for sure I don’t want to be caught in the men’s locker room.”

“Where’ll we go?”

“Just walk the main floor, maybe the basement. We don’t want to be near the patients. One of them might need a real doctor. Then we’d be in real trouble.”

So Whitaker in his white jacket and stethoscope left the locker room with Ethel. The two walked together, slowly but purposefully.

George Snell saw Bruce and Ethel on one of the monitors. They were not of even passing interest to Snell. Just two more figures moving across grainy screens. Besides, Snell was far more involved in what was being shown on commercial TV. And that, as the night or early morning wore on, became more and more select. He was down to mostly test patterns and two UHF channels showing ancient movies. But he kept switching around. One never knew when a given channel might start programming for a new day.

Meanwhile, Bruce and Ethel pretty much maintained their pacing, occasionally resting against an unoccupied booth or station.

“Bruce, I been thinking. We’ve gotten kind of close, you and me. I mean, we have, haven’t we?”

“Yeah, Ethel, I think so. I hope so.”

“And you been going out of your way to try and help me with this problem that I got with Sister Eileen.”

“Oh, Ethel, it’s more than your problem. See, the thing about Sister Eileen, it’s bigger than just you and me. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. But it’s not time yet. It’s too early. At least I think it’s too early. But, after tomorrow . . .” Whitaker checked his watch. “Actually, in just a few hours at most . . .”

“That’s okay, Bruce. The thing I was gettin’ at is . . . well, we’re gettin’ kinda close, and I think I really like you a lot. But we don’t really know each other very good. You don’t know anything about my life . . . I mean before we met. And I don’t know anything about yours.”

“I guess you’re right. Is it important to you? I mean, it’s not all that important to me. The most important thing for me is that we like each other a lot. Maybe we even love each other.”

“I think we do, too, Bruce. But it’s important we know more about each other just so’s we don’t go into this like blind.”

“Oh . . .”

“I’ll go first. I was the fifth of five children—all girls. I never figured out whether Pa kept trying for a boy and didn’t get one and gave up, or whether I wasn’t intended at all. All I know is I wasn’t terribly wanted. So I had a kind of miserable childhood. I went to parochial school and I was smart enough, but . . . clumsy? I broke everything but the rules. And ’cause the nuns were always yelling at me for being uncoordinated, I didn’t do as good in school as I might have. See? There’s a good example for you: I know it should be ‘I didn’t do as well in school . . .’ But why should I speak correctly when I can’t keep a ham sandwich together? I’m so clumsy that I just naturally act dumb. The two go together.”

“Gee, Ethel . . .”

“Wait! So I entered a convent but I didn’t last past being a postulant. By then I had gummed up so many things the mother house hasn’t been the same to this day.

“Since then, I’ve been pretty much on my own trying to find jobs and—even harder—trying to hold onto them after I get them. And that sort of takes us up to the present, where I’m trying like mad to hold onto this job. While the big boss is doing her best to fire me. And what chance do I have in a fight like that!

“So that’s what I am, Bruce: a loser. I’ve been a loser all my life and there ain’t nothin’ that indicates things are about to change. That’s what you got, Bruce, a loser.”

“Ethel! You think you’re a loser! I’ll tell you about a loser! I was an only child. And I went to parochial school too. And I was as awkward and clumsy as you even thought about. Only I wasn’t as smart as you. So when I went to the seminary, I guess I don’t have to tell you I didn’t last long.

“Back then, particularly, there were lots of guys in the seminary. And the professors demanded that you put out. They demanded, oh, accomplishment. I gotta confess to you, I’ve been bitter about that ever since.

“And this is the part that turned out bad: I got in with some other guys and afterward we tried to get even with some of the professors that were in the seminary when we were students. Well, these other guys are easy as clumsy as I am. They won’t admit it, but they are. And, well, being the kind of klutzes we are, we didn’t actually do all that much damage to the priest-professors. But we did enough so that we all got prison terms. I’m out now on parole. The other guys are still in.”

“You mean you actually tried to kill priests? Catholic priests?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“But why?”

“Because we were doing God’s will.”

Ethel shook her head. “Do you do this sort of thing very often?”

“Oh, good grief, no. But I gotta be honest with you: We’re doing it now.”

“Now?”

“Yeah. See, I’m embarrassed about this, Ethel, but I’ve been giving you the impression that I’ve been working on your case, trying to do something about Sister Eileen, so she won’t fire you. Which is true, as far as it goes. But what I’m really doing—or what we’re doing, ’cause the other guys still in prison are in on this too—is we’re trying to get the public eye on this hospital so the Church authorities will have to crack down on all the immorality going on