Greenwich by Howard Fast Page A

never had.
    On board the aircraft carrier, off the coast of Vietnam and amid the screeching, banging hellish noise of an aircraft carrier in action, Harold, as a naval historian, found solace in the antique game of pinochle, which he played with two sailors from the engine room, who taught him the game. He brought the game home with him, and some of the best hours of their marriage were spent with Dr. Ferguson, playing pinochle, a game that can only be played with grim seriousness and loving anger.
    He and Ruth had frequently argued about and discussed “Jewish guilt.” She held that it was genetic, but Dr. Ferguson rejected that view and said there was a limit to how much you could blame on the genes. He put it to the series of misfortunes that spelled out Jewish history, but Ruth insisted that the whole idea of the victim carrying the burden of guilt was fallacious. Harold dutifully excised from his speech any mention of guilt; nevertheless on occasions such as this, he wallowed in it.
    It was a half hour past ten when he reached the hospital, parked, and went to the waiting room, where he found Ruth, drawn and tired, talking to a young redheaded man, who was introduced to him as David Greene.
    â€œYou’re Herb’s son?”
    David nodded.
    â€œHow’s it going with Seth?” Harold asked Ruth.
    â€œNot good,” she said bleakly.
    Harold put his arms around her and kissed her. She tightened the embrace and clung to him. That spelled out her condition to her husband. She was not a clinging woman.
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œDad’s back in the operating room.”
    â€œWhy? What happened?”
    â€œI don’t know what happened. But they called the surgeon back and Dad’s in the operating room again.”
    â€œNow?”
    â€œYes, now.”
    Harold turned to look at David.
    â€œI don’t know much more than that, Mr. Sellig. I was with my girlfriend, Nellie Kadinsky, when Dr. Loring called her and told her to meet him here, at the hospital. She’s his scrub nurse, and he said it was an emergency. I drove her here, and I’m waiting for her.” David hesitated, not knowing what else he should say. He felt he had no right to pass on Nellie’s comments about the operation, and he knew it would only make things worse for Ruth Sellig.
    â€œWhat kind of an emergency? Did she say?”
    David shook his head. “I don’t know.”
    Harold drew Ruth over to a couch, and she huddled against him. He knew enough about bypass operations to realize that stopping the heart twice in a matter of hours was no small thing. What would Seth Ferguson’s death do to Ruth? Her relationship with her father was, he felt, stronger than their own relationship. When she whispered, “Hal, what will I do if he dies?” and he assured her that Seth would not die, it was like the cold wind of death flowing over both of them. He hated hospitals. He had spent hours in the ship’s hospital of the carrier. Terrible things happen on an aircraft carrier, things that the public is never informed of. Every landing of a plane was a passage with death, and Harold remembered a visit to the bomb hold, where there was enough explosive to blow away an entire country; and there the stink of death was not a smell but a vibration thick as molasses, and that was the way it felt in this waiting room now.
    He simply could not ask Ruth whether she had read any of the manuscript or the changes he had made in it. That would be like asking her whether she had touched base with death.
    â€œHow long since the surgeon was here?” he asked. “Did you see him?”
    â€œFor a moment.”
    â€œDid he say anything?”
    â€œJust that there were complications and that he had to hurry off.”
    There was nothing to say that Harold could think of, and Ruth was silent, her mind filled with memories of fishing in the Long Island Sound when she was a small girl, when