Excerpt #4 - The Crack In The Redwood Fence

Introduction To Excerpt #4: Introducing Little General Hospital. Think of Little General as representing 'disease in general' which unsuspectingly often strikes, and gobbles up people like a hawk. Although the main plot of the story centers around family and job and other interrelations, and the variously used interpretations of 'love,' and hedonistic drives and sexuality and excesses of materialism, the sub-plot has to do with disease and aging...which I reference in the preface to the novel...is the great equalizer of all people, humbling the boldest of the bold.
---I will say, without giving away too much so as not to spoil the storyline, that Margaret doesn't need to be humbled. She is already humble. George however is bold. Unfortunately, it is Margaret who the scene opens with looking out the window of Little General Hospital.
---It's later in the story now. A lot has happened by this time. But why should she have been the one to have been stricken with disease? And the multiple horrors of it all, breast cancer in particular, for it attacks your life...your family... and your sense of being a 'woman'!
---...And I know. I'm a compassionate man, and having practiced gynecology in the past, I learned first hand. I witnessed the pain and suffering from diseases like this, time and again...and there are times when I believe I almost felt their pain...and so I ached for them in the face their illnesses. I could not be otherwise
---...As a man of compassion, and having practiced as a gynecologist for so many years, I see things even women do not know.
---And yet, Margaret is so good, the ideal loving and caring wife and mother. So why did George finally bring himself to leave home for someone else?
---Why have family circumstances deteriorated to such a point wherein the loving wife and mother of a once happy family is there, looking out the window of Little General Hospital...forlorn and alone?
---...And she, being who she, is is too proud to tell anyone where she is...and how ill...least of all her husband George!

---Little General Hospital towers massively into the sky, the dirtied bleakness of its greyed exterior walls of concrete looming ominously over the park down below and, such as a vulture perches high upon a limb and hovers omnivorously over, and awaits to gobble up its unsuspecting prey, so too does Little General hover over and await, expectantly but yet patiently, its almost inevitable grasp upon all those innocent beings going about their everyday business of being themselves and living life to its fullest, of interrelating and enjoying and fighting with one anther, yet in an ofttimes unsuspecting and "can't happen to me" naive sort of way.

---Through a lone pane of glass in a window just a few floors from the top, Margaret peers forlornly down upon the little children playing cheerfully and running frivolously through the grass, down upon the youthful mothers strolling their baby carriages, and down upon the young lovers walking arm in arm along the tree lined paths.

---She peers down upon a man and a woman who seem to be in the throes of a lovers' spat. The woman is walking hurriedly away from the man, flinging her arms flagrantly into the air, while he is running and calling after her, seemingly shouting, "...darling!...darling dear!" trying to explain, but Margaret is too high up, and too far away from them to really hear.
---...For, Margaret is now alone in her room at the hospital. She is in another world--far away from the little children, and from the mothers, and the lovers, and from the squabblers--apprehensively anticipating that operation which is now just one day away...so near!

---She watches listlessly as that fiery woman (just as the man is to her rear) suddenly brings her right arm, pocketbook in hand, flying powerfully around to the left in one great circular motion, swivelling her entire body, only to strike him painfully, so it seems, in his left ear! Then, almost immediately, the woman turns back around and continues walking hurriedly away from him, still flinging her arms tempestuously into the air, probably "swearing" or something. Whatever. Margaret couldn't really hear.

---But for a moment, though, as Margaret watches the couple, she thinks of herself and of her husband, George. And then, as she lightly touches her left hand pitifully to her right breast, to the cancer she thinks might be there, she continues looking down upon the man and woman as they seem now to be tearing at one another's hair, and she thinks to herself, "How senseless it all is for them to be fighting like that." Who knows when their time might come--as it so oftertimes does, and so unexpectedly, right out of the blue--wherein they might come to be looking through the hospital window pane from Margaret's side of the glass too!
---...But too late for them then to be looking regrettably back upon their wasted hours fighting in the grass, for Little General gobbles them up and puts an end to all arguments, with a finality such that its decision cannot be overruled. Regrettably, Margaret was now coming to learn that truth, the hard way, as all pathetic creatues ofttimes do, when it's too late, when they are there, on Margaret's side of the glass window pane, looking through.

---And then...
---"Margaret!" The softness of a friendly female voice called out from Margaret's rear. Upon her having turned around, Margaret took note of the nurse standing there, just ten, maybe fifteen feet away, by the doorway which led into the room. The nurse continued speaking with a neutral warmth to her voice, "Come with me, dear..." but then, within instants, and with a curious hesitation in the way she proceeded to complete her sentence, she said, "...there are...some x-rays we have to take..." whereupon she added--with a rather perplexed look to her face--"Don't I know you dear?"