Chapter 31
Thirty-One
Gertie didn’t like to ask for help. When she’d been a toddler and trying to dress herself, she didn’t want to be shown which was her left shoe and which was her right.
She struggled with footwear morning after morning until she understood how the subtle curve of the shoe matched that of the foot.
When it came to such mysterious implements as forks and difficult garments as zippered jackets, she wanted to be shown just three times, often only twice, and then be left to solve the problem herself over days or weeks.
As a result of her insistence on self-sufficiency, she mastered the challenges of the toddler years faster than either her sister or brother.
She was still a preschooler when she expressed contempt for crybabies.
If she sustained a minor cut, she washed it herself, swabbed it with iodine, and applied a Band-Aid.
If later one of her parents noticed the bandage, Gertie explained her failure to involve them by saying, “It wasn’t even a boo-boo.
It was just a so-so.” She put great value on self-sufficiency and physical stoicism, which in nearly all cases contribute to a better and happier life.
Once in a while, however, bad luck has its way, bad luck and tragedy.
Tuesday afternoon, Gertie had come down with what seemed to be a cold.
She went to her room, put on her pajamas, and got into bed with a selection of magazines.
She had no elevated temperature yet. Her mother placed a large carafe of orange juice in an ice bucket at bedside and a box of Kleenex on the nightstand.
In the event that Gertie developed a sore throat, Loretta had tucked a bag of honey-lemon lozenges in a nightstand drawer.
She had wanted to sit for a while with her daughter, but Gertie said, “It’s a silly cold caused by a stupid virus.
I’m smarter than any virus. I’ll be over this in no time.
You have work to do, Momma. You and Daddy have to keep us in diamonds and furs.
” When Loretta dryly noted Gertie possessed no diamonds or furs, the girl said, “But if I wanted them, I could have them one day. I could talk Daddy into it. When you can’t have what you want, you want it more.
That’s when the big trouble starts.” Loretta assured her that Franklin was no more likely to buy her diamonds and furs than he was to buy her an elephant.
If she wanted diamonds and furs, she’d have to work very hard or marry a husband foolish enough to spoil her.
“No problem,” Gertie declared. “One day when you see a woman wearing a white ermine coat and an ermine hat and fifty pounds of diamonds, walking her elephant, you’ll know who she is. ”
The decline was slow. By dinner, Gertie still had an appetite but wanted only chicken noodle soup followed by ice cream.
Chef Lattuada brought the soup and half an hour later homemade chocolate-cherry ice cream.
When Loretta and Franklin came to say good night, Gertie had already fallen asleep.
Rather than wake her to take her temperature, Loretta pressed a hand to the girl’s forehead.
If she felt the slightest bit warmer than normal, it was not enough to be called a fever.
Later it would be determined Gertie woke in the night with a nosebleed, an annoyance that bothered her two or three times a year.
She got out of bed, went into her bathroom, and used a wad of medical cotton to plug her left nostril, which was the source of the flow.
She most likely sat up in bed for a while, head tilted forward, before lying down to sleep once more.
The cotton stopped the bleeding, but it also prevented nasal discharge from escaping the left nostril until she removed it just before she had a light breakfast in bed at nine o’clock the next morning.
A thermometer revealed a one-degree fever, nothing to be concerned about, though no one could know that the events of the night just past all but ensured a mortal crisis.
As the day progressed, Gertie suffered a headache that came and went, watery eyes, congestion she could not fully relieve without risking another nosebleed, chills, and mild fatigue—nothing that suggested a condition worse than the common cold.
Her appetite improved from breakfast to lunch but declined during the afternoon because she’d developed a sore throat.
She was being treated with aspirin, which relieved the headache, and was drinking a lot of fluids.
At bedtime, her father helped her ease into dreams by providing a shot of Scotch in a cup of milk.
Loretta looked in on her twice before midnight, but the girl seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
The decline was slow—but then fast. Gertie wasn’t battling a mere common-cold virus.
She had a sinus infection caused by a strain of staphylococcal bacteria.
The damaged blood vessel in her nose was small; nevertheless, it provided bacteria access to her circulatory system.
Staph can produce toxins leading to septicemia, also called “blood poisoning.” When Loretta checked on her daughter shortly before six o’clock Thursday morning, the girl was sweating and yet shaking from chills.
Her fever had risen to 104 degrees. Her heart raced.
She gasped for breath. She was mentally confused and too weak to get out of bed.
By the time the ambulance transported her to the hospital, her fever had reach 105 degrees, and her blood pressure had fallen to 80 over 50.
The medical team administered intravenous fluids to maintain her blood pressure at 90 over 60, intravenous penicillin and other antibiotics to combat the infection, and oxygen to raise her blood oxygen level.
The urgent purpose was to prevent septicemia from becoming septic shock, which leads to death in more than 60 percent of the cases and sometimes leaves survivors with severe disabilities.
Within an hour of Gertie’s admission to the hospital, it was determined she was already in septic shock.
By the time Lynette and I arrived, in spite of the aggressive treatment the girl was receiving, her temperature had risen to 106.
Although her blood pressure mostly remained stubbornly at 80 over 50, sometimes it dipped to the mid 70s over high 40s.
Widespread blood clotting had perhaps begun, and kidney failure might be imminent.
Franklin always seemed to be a man who could handle any trouble that came his way.
No difficulty, no disappointment, no setback, no threat could disrupt his calm nature or long diminish the optimism that was as much a part of him as his love of making movies.
This Franklin before Lynette and me was not the one I knew.
He was a gray shade of pale. The architecture of his face, previously so pleasing, seemed to have undergone a shift in its substructure.
Horror and grief robbed him of handsomeness.
He appeared tormented, insecure, too lost to be the leading man of any motion picture, which once he could have been.
If our Gertie was alive, even with her vital organs fast failing, there was hope.
I carried that hope like a mystical light in a mysterious vessel, lacking understanding of it but certain of its power.
I wasn’t confident, however, that I could penetrate Franklin’s anguish, convince him of what could be done, and quickly gain his cooperation.
I asked Lynette to stay with him, and I went into room 332, a two-bed unit with only one patient.
In a white hospital gown under a white sheet, Gertie looked no less white than her bedclothes, eyes closed and deathly still.
At the sight of her, my heart mispaced itself, chasing each incomplete beat with the premature start of another so that I could feel the hard palpitations of the extrasystolic rhythm knocking in my breast. A nurse was in attendance on one side of the bed.
Loretta held fast to the railing on the other side, eyes fixed on her daughter, lips moving as if she must be silently reciting a prayer.
I went to her and gripped her left hand, which was clenched around the bed rail.
Though she was unable to speak, her eyes were such pools of misery that no words were necessary to convey her pain and fear.
I spoke softly, presuming that the nurse must be too busy to eavesdrop.
“This is important. I didn’t tell you at the time, when it happened.
I didn’t want to seem like even more of a freak.
Willy Maxwell didn’t just try to poison Rafael.
He succeeded. I found the dog almost dead.
I held him. I held him and . . . you saw.
I don’t know why or how I did it, but I did.
” In Loretta’s anguish, she was not clear-minded enough to understand me at once.
To encourage her, I drew from memory the opening sentence of a classic novel and invested it with an urgency the author never intended.
“‘Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.’ That’s how it starts.
It ends like this.” After rapidly reciting the last fifty-one words of Chapter Twenty-Four, I said, “If you want every word of The Wizard of Oz, I’ve got them.
You know I’ve got them. And so much more.
If that, then why not Rafael? And if Rafael, why not Gertie? ”