I pulled out a five, and Elton fell to the sidewalk. I dropped keys and papers and knelt next to him. He’d hit his head as he went down and was bleeding in an ugly way, but he was breathing, and I could feel his pulse in an irregular, feathery beat, like some fragile ballerina dancing against the music.
The next few hours were a blur of ambulance, emergency room, hospital admissions. They wanted a lot of details, but I didn’t know him except as the homeless guy who’d worked this stretch of West Town the last several years. About the only personal thing he’d told me was that he’d lost his wife as his drinking got heavier. He’d never mentioned children. Today was the first time I’d heard about Vietnam. He’d been a carpenter and sometimes still got daywork. As for health care, I couldn’t help the hospital with their paperwork. He was homeless. I hoped he had a green card for city health services, but I had no way of knowing.
I wanted to get back to my office—I’d been away ten weeks and had an entire Himalayan range of paper waiting for me—but I didn’t feel easy leaving Elton until there was some kind of prognosis or resolution in his care. In the end, it took two hours before an intern who was stretched to the breaking point came in, and that was only because I kept going to the triage nurse and pushing Elton’s case: his crisis, asking for oxygen, heart monitoring, something. He had regained consciousness while lying on the gurney, but his skin was cold and waxy, and his pulse was still very weak.
A white woman in her early thirties, who seemed to be caring for an elderly black man, gave me a wry smile the third time I went up to the counter. “It’s hard, isn’t it? The staffing cutbacks have been too steep. They just can’t keep up with the patient load.”
I nodded. “I just got back from a long stay in Europe yesterday. I haven’t adjusted—to the time zone or our health-care system.”
“Is he your brother?” She pointed toward Elton’s gurney.
“He’s a homeless guy who collapsed in front of my building.”
The woman pursed her soft rosebud mouth. “Would you like me to look in on him if they manage to stabilize him? I have friends at some of the homeless agencies here in town.”
I agreed thankfully. Finally the intern, who didn’t look old enough for high school let alone an inner-city hospital, came over to the gurney. He asked Elton some questions about his drinking and smoking and sleeping. He listened to Elton’s heart and called for an EKG, an EEG, and an echocardiogram. And oxygen.
“He’s got some arrhythmia going on,” the intern told me. “We’ll see how serious it is. If he’s homeless and drinking, it takes a toll.”
Elton smiled at me and pressed my fingers weakly with nicotine-stained fingers. “You run on, Vic. I’ll be okay here. Thanks for—you know, God bless, all that.”
He produced a grubby green card from an inner pocket, so I knew they wouldn’t put him straight out on the street. I caught a cab back to my office and put Elton—not out of my mind, but to the bottom of it. I was exhausted from travel, but I’d been away too long to give myself decompression time before returning to work.
I’d been in Italy, with Morrell, where we’d rented a cottage in Umbria, in the hill country, near my mother’s childhood home. Morrell had finally recovered from the bullets that almost killed him in the Khyber Pass two years earlier. He wanted to test his legs, see if he was ready for journalism’s front lines—he was aching to return to Afghanistan—despite the death of some three hundred journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan since we began our endless war.
My needs were even more personal: I’d grown up speaking Italian with my mother, but I’d never visited her home. I wanted to meet relatives, I wanted to listen to music where Gabriella had learned it, see paintings in their Umbrian and Tuscan light, drink Torgiano in the hills where the grapes grew.
Morrell and I visited the remnants of Gabriella’s family, elderly Catholic cousins who exclaimed how much like Gabriella I looked but who wouldn’t talk about the years she’d had to live in hiding with her father, an Italian Jew. They claimed not to remember my grandfather, who had been denounced and sent to Auschwitz the day after someone smuggled Gabriella to the coast and a Cuba-bound freighter.
No one knew what had become of Gabriella’s younger brother, Moselio. Gabriella herself hadn’t heard from him since he joined the partisans in 1943, and I hadn’t been optimistic. My mother’s been dead a long time, but I still miss her. I was hoping for too much from her Pitigliano family.