The Side of the Angels (11 page)

“Clare's still at the CLC,” Doug said. “She wanted me to tell you, Tony, that Peter Arseneault from Channel Eight is going to be interviewing Bennett Winslow in front of the hospital in twenty minutes, and you should be there to get our two cents in for the eleven o'clock news.”

Winslow was the president of St. Francis Hospital and Coventry's mouthpiece in all this. He'd been doing an adroit job with the press so far. I was curious to see him.

“Damn,” said Tony. “You could have told me sooner.”

“I was overwhelmed with joy at seeing Nicky,” Doug said nastily.

“Your reunion brought tears to my eyes,” said Tony. “Now let's get the hell out of here.”

“Want to tell me where the hospital is?” I said.

“Skip this,” said Tony. “I can get back in an hour and fill you in.”

“I'm coming.”

“I said you don't have to, Nicky.”

“And
I
said I'm coming. Where is it?”

I was furious at him. He hadn't said a word during the exchange with Doug, just stood by and let me duke it out for myself. Not that I needed any Sir Lancelot sticking up for me, but Tony and I both knew
that if Tony was silent when Doug baited me, Doug would see it as a green light for his feeble attempts to throw his weight around.

“Kate can take you,” Tony said. Kate had come over in the last minute and was contemplating Doug with frustrated revulsion, as if he were a giant palmetto bug who had crawled in through the hot water pipes yet again, even though the exterminator had been and gone.

“Yes, I'll take her, since you paragons of chivalry haven't offered,” said Kate. “And then afterward we're going to get something to eat. She's been traveling all day and you guys didn't even fetch her a cup of coffee. Where were you raised, in a barn?”

She handed me a large chocolate chip cookie and a carton of milk, took my briefcase from me, and shoved an extremely unbecoming brown-and-blue-striped wool cap over her ears and forehead. It reminded me of the ones my aunt Deedee used to knit and inflict on us as Christmas gifts. The last thing I saw before the swing door closed behind us with another beauty-shop jangle were Doug's and Tony's faces still turned in our direction. Tony was scowling, his face scrunched up like a rebellious schoolboy's. Doug was frowning petulantly, a frown of balked entitlement, as if he'd just arrived at the theater and someone else was sitting in his seat.

Outside the wind was ten degrees colder than it had been when I arrived. When I took a chilled breath, I realized that early November meant true winter here, winter fully arrived and final. Back home, the scent of loam and falling leaves and damp earth was still in the air. Here the leaves were all off the trees and if the air smelled of anything at all, it was of wet stone and car exhaust.

Ahead of me lay weeks of this same cold. I was going to miss the last of Washington's southern autumn, with its gentle blues and muted golds. I wasn't going to be able to dawdle along Skyline Drive with Louise as we'd planned, getting our last sight of the Blue Ridge before snow closed the mountain passes. I wouldn't be there for those warm Indian summer days when I could walk by the river with only a sweater and throw sticks down the rapids to see how far and fast they floated.

When I miss a season because I'm traveling on business, some small, barely noticed part of me feels wrong and off-kilter until the
year rolls round again to that same season and I recoup the lost time. Someday, I wanted to settle down someplace where I could sit on my own porch and drink lemonade or mulled cider, depending on the weather, and plant an amateur rose garden, and stay still enough to watch four seasons scroll by me in beautiful, detailed entirety. Where this porch and rose garden would be, and how I would live this life of soulful leisure while still earning enough to keep myself in lemonade and cider and the occasional glossy magazine, I didn't know.

“Eat,” said Kate. “You're going to need better gloves.”

Her kindly hectoring reminded me so forcibly of Louise that I felt doubly homesick. I would call Louise when I got to the bed-and-breakfast, I decided. Then I would take a hot bath and finish
Murder on the Orient Express,
which I had left off reading just at the point where Hercule Poirot is amused to find the mysterious scarlet kimono stashed in his own luggage. I would feel better in an hour or two, or a day or two, or a week or two.

“You're the first person I haven't pissed off today,” I said as we waited for the windshield to defrost.

“Hey, when I saw how angry you made Doug, I knew I'd like you,” she said. “Finish that cookie, will you? This could take a while, and I don't want you fainting on me. It would look lousy for the news crew.”

I finished the cookie, guzzled some milk, buckled up, and off we went.

K
ATE WAS A GOOD
driver, rather fast but careful. I hate driving with people who don't know how to handle a car and compensate by whipping around corners and changing lanes in a slapdash, bravura fashion.

“Hamner is clearly delighted you're on board,” she said. “I haven't seen him looking that upset since his first day here, when Tony wouldn't let him sit in on negotiations.”

“I go way back with Doug.”

“And it's clearly been a wonderful association.”

“He's a snake.”

“Tell me how you really feel.”

In my first months with Ron, I'd been assigned to work with Doug on a school board campaign in Minnesota, in a district where the Toilers were joining the teachers' association in backing a pro-union slate in hopes of a better contract for their cafeteria workers and school bus drivers. During the course of the campaign, Doug blamed me for a printing error, an expensive error. It was a headline in a four-color flyer that read, “John Knutsen supports the best for our pubic schools.”
Pubic
schools. Luckily, we caught it before it went out the door to the voters. But not before we'd racked up a hefty print bill that someone had to be blamed for.

That headline was an easy enough mistake to make when you'd been working round the clock. My only fault had been that when I'd asked Doug if he'd had the blue-line proofed by two people besides me, I'd believed him when he said yes. We'd run twenty thousand copies. Fixing it was not cheap.

Doug had asserted, with an air of injured innocence, that I'd told him the piece was ready to go. Advocacy ate the cost of the reprint,
because Ron wanted to keep the Toilers' business. I'd have forgiven Doug for letting me take the fall if that printing fiasco hadn't been merely one of the ways in which he showed his mean streak over the course of that campaign. He was the kind of person who bullies the hired help just to feel important.

“How's Doug going over, anyway?” I asked Kate.

“He hasn't endeared himself to most of us. He'll never sit and stuff envelopes even when everyone else is pitching in. He never makes a pot of coffee or refills the paper tray in the copying machine. He asks us to fax things for him. Well, he tried to. That didn't last long.”

“How's he doing with Clare?”

“He's buttering Clare up for everything he's worth, and she's a little off her game right now, so she doesn't see through it.”

I didn't like the sound of that. Doug's MO was notorious: he hid his incompetence by assiduously currying favor with local leadership, until he became a New Best Friend. Doug did not care for hammering in those home truths and unpleasant realities that local pols needed to be reminded of when the chips are down. “Don't worry,” said Kate. “Tony and I are keeping an eye on him.”

We parked in a staff lot and walked up the circular drive to the hospital's visitors entrance, where the nurses would picket if a strike occurred. Like the rest of Winsack, the hospital had clearly seen better days. Its small but hulking main building had been erected somewhere around the time President McKinley was shot, in purplish-red brick with white wooden trim. It boasted an oddly Moorish cupola surmounted by a brass weathervane in the shape of a tall-masted ship. In its day, this edifice was probably the last word in forward-thinking modern architecture, but now the place had an air of having been the scene of involuntary commitments, lobotomies, and deaths in childbirth. Clumsily attached to the main building were three or four wings from the fifties and sixties, executed in glass and steel interspersed with those hideous aqua panels that were in fashion then.

In a bare, floodlit courtyard between the old and newer buildings stood a solitary statue of Saint Francis preaching to the birds and squirrels, an elongated bronze figure with a countenance oddly gaunt and Scandinavian for an Italian saint. I walked closer and saw that the
statue was labeled with a plaque on which ran the lines of the saint's famous prayer asking God to let him be a “channel of Thy peace.” There wouldn't be too much peace around here for a while.

I said, “Where's Winslow? Isn't he supposed to be out here doing an interview? I want to get a look at this jerk.”

The news crews were setting up with their usual efficiency, but I didn't see anyone who corresponded to the description I'd had of Winslow. The only person in a suit was obviously the Channel 8 reporter, Arseneault. I was truly back in the north, I realized when I heard that classic French-Canadian name. Irish, Italians, French Canadians, Poles—all brought here by the mills, once upon a time. They gave these towns what life they had, and living beside them—above them—was that dying breed still separate and distinct: the flinty, frugal Yankees whose family fortunes had been built on shipping and the slave trade. Kate, I took a guess, came from such a family, despite that Irish-sounding married name.

“You won't believe me, but Winslow's actually not that bad a guy,” said Kate. “He's just in over his head. They imported him from their smallest hospital in Massachusetts, where Coventry's already gobbled up four facilities. That hospital was tiny, and it wasn't unionized, and it served a well-off, suburban patient population. I think Winslow was probably fine there. All he had to do was act executive.”

“Is that him now?”

“That's him.”

Winslow had just walked out of the hospital, which was looking positively Gothic as wisps of fog rose from the sidewalk and drifted in the beating light of the TV cameras. He threw a small nod our way, and Kate gave him a cheery little wave.

It was a blow to see just how personable Bennett Winslow was. If you were casting a sympathetic, dignified hospital CEO in a medical drama, Winslow would have been on your short list. He was in his late fifties, with silver hair, a high forehead, and clean-cut, noble features that were only looking more noble as age drew a few lines that gave the appearance of wisdom earned. As he chatted with the Channel 8 reporter, I could hear that he had a voice like Ron's: deep, self-confident, professionally modulated.

“God,” I said. “He's right out of central casting. I was hoping for someone fat and squinty.”

“Give it a few minutes,” said Kate. “He starts out strong, but then he always adds something that screws him up.”

We drew a little closer to listen in on the interview. Winslow was clearly used to television. He gazed either at Arseneault or straight into the camera, relaxed but not too smooth, without that nervous blink that afflicts anyone who doesn't have long practice in front of the lights. The opening questions were softballs: What was the hospital's position on staffing, was there room for movement at the bargaining table, would there be a strike or could a solution still be reached?

Then the reporter, a likeable, handsome guy with black hair and speaking dark eyes and a trench coat obviously modeled on Peter Jennings's circa 1990, said, “Mr. Winslow, would you comment on the recent death at St. Bernadette's Hospital? Wasn't that a case of inadequate staffing, just like the nurses here are talking about?”

Winslow was clearly rattled. His expression moved from comfortable benevolence to peeved surprise, then became downright cross.

“St. Bernadette's has nothing to do with conditions at this hospital,” said Winslow, his forehead furrowing in a way that his media trainer should have warned him about. “St. Francis is not St. Bernadette's, and it would not be appropriate for me to comment on that case. The staffing philosophy is certainly not the same.”

St. Bernadette's, I knew from Weingould's folder, was the Coventry hospital in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where a patient had died two weeks earlier from being given an incompatible blood type. It was a nursing assistant's error. Coventry would give the poor things six weeks training and then shove them into critical-care units with very little supervision or help. Coventry was hoping that they could replace nurses with large numbers of these low-paid assistants, as if nursing skills were as easy to pick up as running a cash register or flipping burgers. Lots of the hospitals were doing it, and the resulting horror stories were beginning to hit the news.

The case had been getting a lot of play, especially since the victim was a fifteen-year-old girl. Coventry hadn't come off well in the latest
newshour segment, which included footage of the bereaved family laying flowers at Lisa's grave and inviting the reporter into their living room to look at photos of the deceased teen in her marching band uniform.

“Actually, isn't the staffing philosophy exactly the same?” said Arseneault. “Coventry is gearing up to replace nurses with unlicensed assistants here at St. Francis, aren't they?”

“One-on-one patient care by a nurse at the bedside is overrated in terms of medical outcomes,” Winslow asserted, obviously not familiar with recent studies that showed just the opposite. “Most patients don't need their hands held every moment of the day.”

Tsk, tsk. Guess which quote from this interview would make the evening news?