The Viewing Room

HAVING WORDS

[having words] “I’ll take the ex-wife, and you take the girlfriend,” Maurice whispered . “I have seniority and I get first pick. Whatever we do, we can’t let them meet anywhere in this hospital and have words. Is that a deal?” Henrietta didn’t answer. She was staring at Maurice’s salad bowl as he ladled out beets on top of his cottage cheese, instantly turning the top of his salad puffy and pink, like necrotic brain tissue. Her stomach lurched. She had not been able to hold down a full meal since fulfilling her Clinical Pastoral Care unit and its most dreaded final requirement, witnessing an autopsy. Now she could tell a patient ’s family, candidly, that she knew, slice by slice, how the procedure was handled, and could reassure them that the body was always treated with care and dignity. It was just bad luck, the morgue clinician had told her, shrugging his shoulders, that the case she had been called in to witness was a ten-year-old girl. The girl’s mother had found her early that morning. She had hung herself in her closet with a jump rope. She had left a note, presumed suicide, but because of the age it was a coroner’s case and an autopsy was legally required. Nobody had warned Henrietta how autopsies began, with the face and the skin peeled off, starting right under the chin. “How did you do it, Maurice?” she asked, keeping her voice low as they scuttled forward to the soup line. “How could you stand to see one?” He shook his head. [38] having words “Never saw it. A person doesn’t see what they are not looking at—didn’t actually see anything. I put Vaseline over my contacts. Couldn’t see a damn thing, thank God.” “Maurice? Really?” “Sure. All the Spiritual Care Department manual requires is that a chaplain intern must be present in the morgue while an autopsy is being performed. And I was there. I was in the room. But I knew better than to focus on all the gory details.” “But that’s the whole point of it, Maurice, we are supposed to know all the gory details . . .” “Oh, my God, spare me the ‘better-off-knowing’ argument, all right? It’s toxic knowledge, Hen. Useless. Ominous. Look at you, Exhibit A, just wasting away. Haunts you forever. It’s like seeing the outside air temperature on the airplane map screen when you’re forty thousand miles up—what good is that little scientific tidbit of information going to do for you, unless you plan to take a stroll out on the wing and need to know it is minus 150 degrees so you can dress warmly?” Henrietta laughed. “It’s just that I thought I had to see it in order to understand it.” “Oh, for God’s sake, really? Tell me then, Miss Understand-It-All. What colorful visual memory of that poor little girl’s insides did you see in there that helped you understand anything about why Patty died the way she did? Please, enlighten me. Please.” On the last “please,” the tray in his hands shook so hard that his iced coffee fell over. He had a chronic familial tremor triggered by stress. “Shit,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” When Henrietta took the tray from him, she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. And then it hit her. He knew that little girl’s name. By the time he came back, he had calmed down. He put the coffee , now covered with a double lid, on the tray, and took the ruined salad off and dumped it. having words [39] “Oh, Maurice. I had no idea. I’m so sorry. Patty was one of your patients?” He sighed and shook his head silently. Then he put his arm around her shoulders and led her around to the other side, where the breads, cheeses, and lunch meats were kept in huge bins. He reached for the largest plastic bowl, bigger than the one he had filled before. “Now, let’s concentrate on putting lunch together. It may be hours before you have the chance to eat again.” “All right, I know.” Henrietta took it from his hands. She would wait for a better time to talk about this. Maurice hated emotional scenes, particularly in the cafeteria...