The Third Generation (31 page)

“You know better than that,” Roy said. “I like my women tall, twenty and terrific.”

“You like your women, period,” Margy corrected.

They turned dazzling smiles on Charles.

“We didn’t look for you back this morning,” Margy said.

He grinned. “Well, here I am.”

“My, such dashing wit. I bet you slay the girls with your clever repartee.”

Charles had to laugh. “Hardly.”

“You do it with your dimples, don’t you, Charles?” Theresa said.

“With his eyes, dear,” Margy amended. “With his long gorgeous lashes. Why don’t you give some girl those lashes, Charles? It’s unfair.”

“I wish I could,” he said, feeling the blood rise in his face.

“Look, you’re making him blush,” Theresa observed.

“Don’t pay any attention to us,” Margy said. “We’re just jealous. We’re just two girls trying to find a boy.”

“I’ll bet,” he said. “I’ll bet you got so many guys lined up they have to draw straws to see who gets a date.”

“Listen to Charles!” Theresa exclaimed. “Who said he couldn’t talk?”

Roy didn’t like the attention Charles was getting. The waiters, dribbling past to their various stations, kidded him.

“Roy’s getting some competition.”

“He doesn’t like it either—eh, Roy?”

“He’ll have the new boy treed ‘fore lunch.”

“Better watch it, Roy. You’ll lose your pretty home, boy.”

The young women were delighted. They enjoyed their popularity with the colored waiters. Their influence on Charles was magic. It changed the face of the day. Now everything was pleasant.

He made several trips with Roy and brought down trays of dirty dishes. The dishwashers shouted to him as they’d done the day before. But he just smiled. The last time up Roy told him that a famous dog that was used in motion pictures had occupied that suite. He was smiling to himself when he brought down the tray. The young women noticed it. When he returned from the dishwashers, Theresa called, “What’s so amusing, Charles?”

“Share it with us, Charles,” Margy said. “Don’t be stingy. What happened up there? Some dame slip her peignoir?” she asked jokingly out of the side of her mouth.

“I was just wondering how a dog would look in a dinner jacket,” he said enigmatically.

The young women exchanged glances, looked at him with raised brows. His laugh was infectious; they laughed with him. The elevator door was ajar; the light was out. He reached inside, feeling for the switch, looking back at the young women with a secret grin, and they were smiling in return, feeling happy that he liked them, and he was already loving both of them without even knowing it.

He stepped into the elevator. Out and away from where he stepped was nothing. He clutched spasmodically with both hands, finding nothing. For a brief tight instant he was filled with the sense of falling. He was fully conscious of falling. He felt the sensation of his body going swiftly down through the darkness with nothing to stop it. He was aware that he didn’t scream. There was no time for fright or panic or the explosion of emotions in his mind. His senses were filled with the knowledge of his falling and he was rational. As quickly it was over. He felt the jarring impact of striking bottom. No instant pain engulfed him. It was an over-all crushing sensation, not localized, but absolute, which should have made a crushing sound. But he didn’t hear anything. He was conscious.

Immediately he tried to stand. It was a reflex action accompanied by the self-conscious humiliation of an able-bodied man who slips on ice. He put down his left hand to brace himself. There was a queer, funny sensation as if his hand were some distance away from where he’d placed it. Then fire lanced up his arm and shattered in his brain.

A moment later he heard a tremulous voice as if from a great distance crying, “Help! Help! Help!” His mind was like a spotless vacuum from which all thought had been dynamited by one clean, clear blast. His first rational thought was of the darkness. He couldn’t see himself and felt at a great disadvantage. The voice was sharply annoying and he wished violently that it would stop. “Help! Help! Help!” As yet he hadn’t realized it was his own. He gritted his teeth in annoyance. Again the white brilliant blast exploded in his head.

Then there was light above him. The basement door to the elevator had been opened. Figures moved against the light like tribal dancers. Voices began penetrating his thoughts but the words had no meaning, as if they were all in a foreign tongue. He thought, “Now they’ll help me,” and relaxed. He felt queer inside and broken in a number of places. But it was not frightening now that help had come. A light was flashed into the pit. His body was huddled in a grotesque position against the heavy steel guard supported by a mammoth steel spring rising two feet from the center of the pit to catch the elevator should it plunge out of control. The front of his white jacket was splattered with blood. He was looking upward, faintly smiling.

Someone called above, “HOLD THAT ELEVATOR!”

A waiter and one of the garage attendants jumped down into the pit to lift him out.

“Oh!” he exclaimed when the garageman sought to shift him. “I think my arm is broken,” he said weakly.

“Watch his arm!” the waiter said roughly. The garage-man was sweating.

They straightened him out with infinite care.

“We need some help,” the waiter called.

Two others jumped into the pit. The four of them, two on each side with arms beneath his body, the garageman at his head, his greasy hands beneath his armpits, the waiter at his foot, lifted him above where a number of others, lying flat on their stomachs, reached out and took him from the shaft.

“Oh!” he cried faintly as they handled him. “Oh!” The blinding flashes were striking in his brain like April lightning.

Some one had thought of blankets and they laid him gently on the basement floor. He looked up and saw the face of Mr. Small bending toward him. “We’ve sent for the ambulance, son, and I’ve sent for your parents.” His smile was gone; the headwaiter’s face was furrowed with anguish and concern.

“I’m all right,” he whispered faintly.

About him were the faces of many others, waiters and bus boys, chefs and many of the hotel’s guests, all marked with that morbid recognition of human helplessness. The two young women stood close, their bright, tear-filled eyes, enlarged with shock, against dead-white skin.

“I’m all right,” he said again, the sound barely carrying beyond his lips. He felt as if he were crying inside, the tableau held breathless by some powerful emotion, but there was no pain. Way underneath he was remotely pleased, and couldn’t help it, to be the center of this absolute attention.

The hotel doctor and nurse arrived and briskly took command. “Clear away these men,” he ordered. “Give me the shears, Miss Tate.”

While two of the remaining waiters turned his body, the doctor cut away his clothes. He moved his head to look down at his body, which felt so queer. His left arm, he noticed, was broken off completely just above the wrist, blood spotting the white jagged ends of the bones as if the blood were being squeezed from them, and his hand projected away at a right angle, held only by flesh and skin. He studied the fracture carefully without thinking. His eyes were dark with shock, of a velvet, liquid mindlessness, immense in his pale tan face, reflecting no intelligence whatever. The pain had not come. Blood was seeping slowly from his chin, running down his throat. It felt as if he munched a mouthful of gravel. Only the upper part of his body felt covered but he could see his legs were covered also. He tried to move his foot but it didn’t respond.

“Now,” the doctor said, lifting his right arm. He felt the sharp sting of the hypodermic needle. But he didn’t feel it when it went into his hip.

He didn’t worry. He’d given himself into the hands of someone and felt content. Almost immediately a drowsiness affected him.

“Is he in much pain?”

“No, he’s still in shock. I’ve given him sufficient morphine for an hour or so of relief.”

He heard the voices as from a distance.

The ambulance came down the ramp almost silently.

“Carefully, boys,” the doctor said.

The blunt-faced driver looked at him. They were professionals. Charles barely felt it when they slid the stretcher beneath him. The doctor instructed them to take Charles to a large new hospital nearby.

“And what’s your name, Doctor?”

“He’s not my patient. He’s an Industrial Commission case. Instruct the hospital to notify the Industrial Commission.”

The attendant looked disgusted. “We were called by the hotel.”

“Bill the hotel then. But get on with the boy for God’s sake.”

“As you say, chief,” the driver said, shifting into gear.

Charles heard the conversation clearly as he lay drowsily on the stretcher. Just before the siren sounded he heard one of the attendants say, “What kind of goddamn crap is this—no doctor!” He didn’t worry. He was confident of being cared for. Underneath all else, consciousness that he possessed a father and mother supported his indefinable faith in the outcome. Now he felt the ambulance slow and turn and stop before the emergency entrance to the hospital.

The attendants opened the door and lifted him out into the bright cold sunshine. He turned his head and saw a dark-haired young doctor step from the doorway and hold up his hand to stop them.

“Ho! What have you got there?” He had dark, well-cut features and his hair was slicked like patent leather in the sun.

“Accident!” the driver said. He was a big, red-faced man with pug features and sandy hair. “Fell down an elevator shaft.”

The doctor sobered. He wore heavy, dark-rimmed glasses. He came over and looked down at Charles with sudden interest. His expression went entirely blank. He turned back to the driver. “Where did this happen?”

“Park End.”

“Who’s the doctor?”

“Commission case.”

“Hold him,” the doctor said impassively, turning back inside. “I’ll see.”

“Hold him!” the driver exploded. “What the hell you mean
hold him
? What the hell you got to see? You can see! It’s an accident! You can see that! What the hell else you got to see?”

“I said hold him here,” the doctor instructed in a cold, controlled voice. Sunlight glinted on his glasses.

“
You
said!” the driver shouted. “So
you
said! Who the hell are
you
?” The doctor closed the door behind him. “What the hell’s the matter with that son of a bitch?” the driver raved.

A moment later the young doctor returned with the resident doctor, an older man with graying hair, also of dark aquiline features. As he came, wearing a peculiar expression, he slowly shook his head, looking at the driver with confidential eyes. He carried a hypodermic syringe.

“What do you mean?” the driver challenged.

The resident doctor spread his hands with eloquent appeal. “We can’t take him.”

Charles watched the red climb up the back of the driver’s neck. “What the hell you mean you can’t take him?”

“We have no room,” the doctor said, emphasizing the statement with spreading hands.

“What the hell you mean no room? In all this goddamn hospital you ain’t got no room for an accident case?”

“We have no beds,” the doctor said, closing his hands abruptly to end the discussion. “I’ll give the patient an injection.”

“You’ll give this patient not a goddamned thing. He’s had an injection. That’s all you goddamn bastards want to do, give the man an injection.”

The eyes of the resident doctor glinted with anger. “Don’t call me a bastard.”

“Yes, I’ll call you a bastard you bastard. You’re not only a bastard but you’re both bastards. What’s this, a goddamned private exclusive hospital, you bastard?”

The lips of the two doctors folded tightly in anger as they turned, without replying, and re-entered the hospital. For a moment the two ambulance attendants stood outside holding Charles in the stretcher and raved. “Jesus Christ, sweet Holy Mary, these bastards’ll leave a man croak right outside their door.”

The other one looked at Charles. “Let’s go,” he urged.

Charles felt the sense of motion. He’d been unaffected by the harsh exchange. It seemed vaguely as if years were passing. He wished they’d stop somewhere so he could go to bed.

He was taken to a hospital on Euclid where Negroes were admitted. The firm of doctors who treated accident cases for the Industrial Commission were notified. He was sponged and prepared for X-rays and given additional injections of morphine. Everyone was cheerful and efficient. He felt safer. But until his mother came he could only wait.

She was out of the house that morning, shopping. His father was at work, and William was in school. So he went through it alone. They were there, anyway, as much as they would ever be. He had never gone to them in his deepest hurts, or shared with them any of his fullest triumphs or his bitterest defeats. They were his parents who had given him birth, and because of this more than for any other reason he loved them with his life and would have died for them. And the fact that he was tied to them by being born of them prevented him from ever being physically alone. There had been many times in his young life when this had been important. It was important now. He needed the nearness and comfort of their physical presence more than he had ever needed it. But inside his spiritual being, where it was still empty of the emotions that would come—fear and panic and despair—they had never touched. His mother had come closest, but always she’d drawn back from the intensity of his longing when it reached that point where he needed someone most. In that respect he’d always been alone.

Shortly, three doctors arrived and he was wheeled into the X-ray room.

“How’d this happen, lad?” one asked.

Charles avoided the bright blue, inquisitive eyes. “I wasn’t looking,” he answered faintly.

The doctor chuckled. ‘That epitaph should adorn half the tombstones in this civilized world.”

The findings showed that he had three fractured vertebrae at the base of his spine, a compound fracture of the left arm above the wrist, a fractured jaw and twenty-two chipped and broken teeth. The extent of the internal injuries was indeterminable, but there was no indication of internal hemorrhage. He’d landed partly on the elevator guard and partly on the concrete floor of the shaft. His chin, back, and left arm had struck simultaneously.