They stood at the crosswalk, Dr. Bolger saying that he never got tired of the view of the hospital from the other side of the street. John realized that he would never care about anything as much as Walt and Larry cared about that building.
They entered through the main lobby to a complicated mix of smells: flowers from the gift shop, bland, utilitarian food from the cafeteria, and the medicines that dangled hope before all who entered. Until he had begun escorting his mother to her appointments, John hadn’t been in the building since Katie was born.
The old doctor strolled in regally and marched straight toward the private administration offices.
“Excuse me. Can I help you?” a receptionist asked.
“Yes, dear. I’m Walter Bolger. Doctor Walter Bolger.” He gestured to a wall opposite her, where portraits of the hospital’s founders were on sober display.
The receptionist saw his portrait and squirmed as he smiled unctuously. John got the feeling this wasn’t the first time the old man pulled this.
“I’m so sorry, sir. I’m new here.”
“Quite all right; we were all new here once. When I was new here, here was a cornfield!” He spread his arms wide for effect.
He walked John to the wall of founders and stood him before the image of his father. John remembered being in the hospital lobby for the unveiling of the portrait, within a year of his father’s death. Mike was a no-show that day; by that point, he would’ve been somewhere getting high, or working out with his band.
Larry Husted was no older than forty-five when the photograph was taken in the early eighties. The ghastly remnants of seventies fashion had lost most its grip, but his sideburns were still a bit too long, his glasses still had that racy sort of aviator style that were all the rage back then. Larry had on a vibrant blue suit jacket that his peers might have considered just a bit radical, given his age and status.
The same photo of his father sat eternally beneath a hazing of dust in the family home where his mother lived. The man in the photo was dynamic. Whenever John noticed the picture, he sometimes convinced himself that his old man was sporting a loose perm.
John nodded toward the portrait. “Did he do something? With his hair?”
“What?” Dr. Bolger asked with surprise.
“Nothing.”
They stood in silence, until it became uncomfortable. The old man finally broke the reverie by leading John farther into the building.
They passed what had been Dr. Bolger’s office for decades. Obligatory pictures of his late wife and assorted family members personalized a space that was otherwise efficiently all business.
John stared into the room next door, his father’s old office. This was where the stroke got him. That was the floor where he fell. One morning a lifetime ago, Larry Husted walked through the doorframe where his son now stood, and he never walked out again.
At the moment the father passed through this space one final time, the son was across town, at school, not seeing anything coming.
Dr. Bolger stood with his hand on John’s shoulder, understanding where his thoughts were. They moved on.
* * *
Rounding a corner, they nearly collided with a man in his mid-forties wearing a jacket and tie and an unmistakable air of anxiety.
“Ah, Dean. Good!” Dr. Bolger smiled. “This is John Husted, Lawrence Husted’s son. John, this is Dean Durning, our hospital administrator.”
Durning shook John’s hand as the old man seemed to be forcing them together.
“Hey, John. Good to meet you. I was five years ahead of you, all through school. My sister Peggy was in your class. Peggy Durning?”
“Right, sure,” John said. He had no idea who Peggy Durning was, but her brother was trying way too hard.
“I was just giving John a tour of the place,” Dr. Bolger said.
“A tour! Great!” He grabbed John’s hand again. “Your father is a legend around here. A legend. If there’s ever anything any of us can do for you…”
“Thanks,” John said, unsettled by the guy’s fidgeting. Durning popped back into his office as Dr. Bolger and John continued on.
“Dean is a good man, he’s really taking good care of this place,” the old man told John. “You’ll like him.”
* * *
They walked on, seemingly without purpose, until Dr. Bolger stopped at a door marked HOSPITAL STAFF ONLY. The old man punched in a code and as he opened the locked door, John saw stairs leading down and heard the throbbing pound of heavy machinery. “Come on,” the old doctor said, ignoring John’s skeptical look.
John followed him down the stairs and along rows of generators and boilers echoing through the vast basement. Dr. Bolger shouted to him above the noise.
“This is the guts of this place! This whole building, it’s like a living organism, and here is where its life comes from!”
John imagined Walt Bolger and his father as young men decades ago, poking around here throughout construction like a couple of kids. He pictured lunch-bucket guys in hard hats shooing the two of them off, only to have them slip back down the next day to check on progress. Rather than take John back to the terrible day his best friend died, maybe the old man simply wanted to show John the secret corners of what he and his father had built together.
They pressed on, Dr. Bolger navigating a maze of corridors and vast industrial spaces without slowing. At what had to have been the farthest reach of the basement, in the corner of a cluttered storage room filled with ancient hospital beds and bulky, decommissioned machinery, the old man stood before an exit door.
“How’d you like to have a look inside the old hospital?” he asked with a strangely constricted smile. “Your father put in a lot of hours there, a lot more than he got to see in the new building. When he was just about your age, that old place was his everything.”
John hesitated. Old Holt Memorial held strong memories for him. It was the monolithic taskmaster that kept John’s father away from him throughout his childhood, but it was also a tangible place where by all accounts Larry Husted helped an awful lot of people get better.
But above all else, it was a spooky old building that few people got to poke around in. A building where people had died, where ghosts might still stir the cobwebs.
John liked recognizing the little boy inside him who answered back:
“Sure!”