She seldom understood anything he said to her any more, but on good days she seemed to be pleasantly diverted by the noise he made, and liked it, the way she seemed to like the radio that the nuns had set to play soft-rock music at low volume on the table beside her bed, smiling absently and briefly from the distant world nearby where she had gone to live, if living was still what she did. He thought perhaps she had found his father, Pat, and perhaps her mother, Rose, there for company, and that maybe Rose was being nice, happier with them in that new world than she had ever been with them in the one where the three of them had lived before. He surmised that when she was off in that place she liked the sounds he made, not for their content, or the effort the producer of them made, but for what they were themselves, as a kitten likes and is amused by squeaking sounds emitted by a rubber mouse.
On not-so-good days, perhaps when she and Pat had quarreled, as they sometimes had when he had still been present where she used to live, and physically remained, or Rose was being cranky, the sounds that Ambrose made seemed to vex her, and when she verged on lucidity as she generally did, once or twice an hour, regardless of her inner state she would irritably make small, tidy brushing motions. He was fairly certain that she meant them to dismiss the noise-maker. On those days he subsided, and sat silently with her for as long as he could stand it, half an hour more or so, departing with the excuse in his head that the length of his stay no longer mattered, and the fact of it might not, either, except to the good nuns who observed in passing with approval his filial devotions.
This Saturday had been an in-between day. She hadn't really taken any notice of him or what he said. Her entertainment offering to him had been to look over vacantly and then pick tremulously at her third meal of the day sections of pink grapefruit and a small dish of canned beef soup, accompanied by a half-pint container of skimmed milk and a slice of whole wheat bread with a pat of margarine, a dixie cup of peppermint-stick ice cream, served to her on the narrow telescoping bed-table, usable when she was in the wheelchair, as she had been that afternoon. Then she had placidly looked on while it was taken away, mostly undisturbed, and a short while after that he had gone away himself.
He thought that on Monday he might call her doctor again, for no good reason except his own need to feel that he had at least tried to do something, even though he knew before he made the effort that there was nothing to be done and it would do no good to try.
The doctor he prefaced his answer to every question with "As your mother's primary-care physician' was a large slow-moving red-haired man named Carlson, in his early forties. He seemed always to be working out a complicated mathematical problem in his head. Most likely it was always the same one, Merrion believed, relating to the possibility of obtaining additional money for his services from the family estates or the insurers of the patients, without any additional or more effective effort on his part; endless, useless calculations of no possible use to anyone except him, conducted visibly so that it would always be clear to everyone that he did not and would not ever wish to be interrupted, and would regard any attempt to do so as an imposition, punishable by neglect of the patient.
That evident desire of his cut no ice with Merrion. He received regular quarterly statements from the Hightower Mutual Life Assurance Society in Fort Recovery, Ohio, reporting benefits it had paid to James N. Carlson, M.D. under Pauline Merrion's Medicare Supplement Extended Benefits Policy. If each of the forty-one other patients occupying all but three of the extended-care beds available at St. Mary's on the Hilltop had a policy or other resource remitting to Dr. Carlson, attending house physician, the same amount that he was getting from Hightower for Polly, that stolid man was pulling down $2,730 every week, $141,960 every year, for what appeared to Merrion to consist chiefly of saying over and over again that just as Merrion had thought 'there's been no change in the past um week, um um, no change that I see, at least. But her heart still seems to be very strong. Doesn't seem to be much more we can do that we're not doing already. She's, yes, she's still holding her own."
On the television screen the beautifully silky, streaming tawny and white long-haired regal dogs trotted beautifully in turn around the ring on the leashes that their nondescriptly dressed diligently trotting handlers pretended that they did not need, and Ambrose Merrion on Saturday night sat depleted by his caring, watching them compete without ever knowing why, except that they existed, and that was what they had been bred to do.
