Had the idea of Lenore simply occurred to Daisy as she’d languished in the parish house bedroom? Are there such psychological cases—childless women with delusions of motherhood? We’d heard of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a pathology in which a mother, desperate for attention, wounds her child in some tender way (slight suffocation with a baby blanket, a teensy-weensy spoonful of kitchen cleanser) to have an excuse to visit a doctor or an emergency room and to bask in the attention we reserve for women with sickly babies. And, to be frank, it’s a kind of insanity too many of us can understand. A doctor with an irresistible bedside manner, a nurse who hugs.
When my last husband—my second—died after three weeks in a hospital in Omaha, I couldn’t bear to not go back to room 526. I desperately missed the nurses we’d loved, and I even missed the ones we hadn’t liked nearly as much. I missed my husband’s roommates (he’d had three in the three weeks there), and I missed his roommates’ wives, and I even missed all their visitors. Polite, they’d respectfully looked past the partially drawn curtain to ask about my husband’s condition, his progress, where we were from, what we’d done with our lives, when we might be going home. I loved the sardonic humor of my husband’s nurses—the delight they took in temporary human fallibility. They were, to a person, unshaken by sickness, but not in a callous, cynical way. Their lack of sentiment was a beacon of hope—it was like they knew something we didn’t, that there was no need to be morose, that they wouldn’t bother with efforts of survival if survival was unlikely.
And so, two weeks after I buried my husband, I returned to the hospital in Omaha, checking into a nearby Holiday Inn. I spent most of one week on the hospital’s first floor, in the cafeteria, the chapel, the florist. The corner coffee shop, with a wall of windows and a view of a memorial rose garden, served a pineapple-whip ice-cream cone that I’d been craving. I ate the cone and read a paperback I’d bought from the gift shop. I bought a tote bearing the hospital’s logo, and a pair of slippers. I gossiped with the old-lady volunteers in their smocks, women who didn’t know that my husband was dead and who kindly asked after his health. (“Good,” was all I could bring myself to say—one simple word didn’t seem like a psychotic lie.) I didn’t dare go to my husband’s old room. As much as I wanted to travel up in the brightly lit elevator with its carpet on the walls, I couldn’t risk seeing someone alive in his bed, some survivor of something. And, of course, the nurses I’d loved would’ve spotted me, clucked their tongues with a mix of distress and sympathy, and sent me away. Our nurses belonged to other people now.
This went on for several days, until Doc found me out, and he and Tiff came to retrieve me. They walked up to me in the coffee shop as if they’d only happened by. They had liked the pineapple-whip cones too, so we spent a little while right there, pretending nothing was amiss. Doc finally let Tiff buy an overpriced yarn-haired rag doll she’d had her eye on in the gift shop throughout my husband’s last weeks—Tiff was about seven at the time, Ivy having only just left her in Doc’s care. “We can’t buy it,” he’d told her before; “we’d be depriving some sickly baby of it,” and Tiff had learned to feel noble for simply not having the doll. But on this afternoon’s return to the hospital, Doc slipped a ten-spot into Tiff’s fist, as some kind of tribute to grief, perhaps. “I can’t stand thinking of all those little girls walking by that ugly, pricey doll,” he said, “and wanting it, and never getting it. The least we can do is get it out of the window.” Then, later, “Cocktail hour,” Doc said. “Let’s go downtown for a martini,” and with that, he and Tiff eased me out of the hospital, into the city, then onto the interstate, and home.