Jeanie

 

JEANIE

by

TOM DURKIN

 

 

“Did you notice anything unusual in the paper this morning?” Jeanie asked when Carl answered the telephone.

“I haven’t seen the paper yet. Why? Is there something I should see?”

“Look at the top right hand corner on page A-14,” she said.

Carl put the telephone down and recovered the rolled-up newspaper from the porch just outside the front door. Returning to the kitchen, he opened the paper on the table as they talked

“Do you mean: Decomposed Body Found In Illegal Dump Along Lehigh River?” he asked when he found the page.

“Uh huh.”

Jeanie was the second of Carl’s three daughters . Before cancer took his wife two years earlier, Carl and Jeanie had little to say one another beyond the basic civilities that pass between a daughter and her father. Since her mother died, Jeanie turned to Carl if she had a problem or needed a sounding board.

The story Carl read told of the partly decomposed body of a man police believed died under suspicious circumstances that was found the previous day. The county coroner reported the unidentified body was that of a white, balding but one-time brown-haired man with a mustache, between 35 and 45 years old. The man probably stood five feet seven inches tall, and weighed about 135 pounds.

“You think it’s Frank?” Carl asked when he finished reading.

“Well, he hasn’t called me lately and I haven’t seen him in more than three months,” she said. “I called his mother and brothers this morning and they haven’t heard from him either. And look at that description.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Frank,” Carl assured his daughter.

“I couldn’t go in to work today,” Jeanie said. “When I read that in the paper, Frank was the first thought that came to my head. I guess it was the shock of just seeing it in print and having all that old shit race through my mind again. I’m still shaking. It’s got to be him. I just know it–”

“It doesn’t have to be Frank,” Carl interrupted, “and even if it is, there’s nothing you or I can do about it. There never was much anyone could do about Frank, anyway.”

Carl never liked “the scruffy little bastard” from the first day Jeanie started dating Frank Madison eleven years ago. Jeanie was seventeen then, a junior in the honors program at the high school, and Frank was thirty-one, working three days a week at the structural steel company over by the Lehigh River.

Frank graduated close to the top of his class from the same school as Jeanie, but fifteen years earlier in the mid 1960′s, and left almost immediately for the Army. When he finished his tour in Viet Nam, he came back to the Valley heavily dependent on alcohol and drugs. At the time Jeanie started dating him, Frank had a reputation around Wescosville as an abusive drunk and a bully.

“You should be dating people your own age,” Carl told Jeanie back then, “young men with interests and ambitions similar to your own.”

Jeanie refused to listen to him or to her mother, and Carl remembered how angry he became three years later when, after a ten-day disappearance, Jeanie and Frank returned to Wescosville and announced that they were married.

Carl walked over to the sink and continued talking to Jeanie while rinsing out his coffee cup. He refilled it with fresh cold tap water, put it in the microwave and set the timer for five minutes. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d just wait and see what develops.”

As he spoke the words, Carl regretted what he had said. Carl had a habit of telling others what he would do if he were them. As an partly-retired consulting engineer, Carl was still well paid for his professional advice; as a father, it was a different matter. And though he meant well, not everyone looked upon Carl’s suggestions as indications of his concern for them, least of all Jeanie

“I don’t mean to tell you what to do, Jeanie, and I apologize,” Carl said. “God knows you’re old enough and smart enough to know what’s best for you, I just meant–”

“I understand, Dad,” Jeanie broke in on Carl’s apology, “I called the coroner earlier and made an appointment to go to the morgue this afternoon, before the autopsy. If you’re not too busy, I’d like you to come with me. Can you make it?”

“I’ll go if you want me to,” Carl answered, “but I think it’s a waste of time.”

“Do you mind if I come over and wait at your house until we go,” Jeanie asked. “I’m too hyper to sit around here, and I don’t have the energy to go out walking for the next three hours.”

“I’ll see you when you get here,” Carl said. He hung the receiver back in its cradle on the kitchen wall and took down the jar of decaffeinated instant coffee from the cabinet over the stove for his second cup of the morning.

It’s going to be a long day, he thought.

Carl was talking to a client on the telephone when Jeanie entered. He nodded to his daughter and motioned her to sit down as he continued talking and listening. Carl shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, indicating to Jeanie he didn’t know how long the call would take. Jeanie acknowledged his nod and walked through to the kitchen.

“Do you want another cup of coffee?” she asked without words, gesturing to the cup in her hand when she caught Carl’s eye,

Carl shook his head. Jeanie placed the cup of water in the microwave and took down the instant coffee. Before the coffee water was ready, Carl finished on the telephone and greeted his daughter with a hug.

“My appointment is for one-thirty,” Jeanie said as the two sat down at the kitchen table, “and I appreciate you’re coming with me. I don’t think I could face this on my own.”

Jeanie looked tense and uncomfortable, distracted, Carl thought. He couldn’t remembered his daughter this visibly upset since she came home for her mother’s funeral.

“Would you care for some lunch?” he asked.

“Thanks, no. I don’t think my stomach would welcome food just now.”

Carl took a large plastic bag of salad greens and salad dressing from the refrigerator. On his way back to the table he recovered a glass dish from the cupboard next to the sink and a knife and fork from the cutlery tray on the counter top over the dishwasher.

As Carl mixed the salad greens and dressing on his plate, Jeanie sipped her coffee and waited in silence. She clutched the cup with both hands as though it would fall off the table if she were to let go.

“When I saw that piece in the paper this morning,” Jeanie said, breaking the silence, “I didn’t know what to think. I just felt so helpless–”

“Either it’s Frank or it’s not,” Carl broke in, anticipating a long soliloquy from his daughter, and hoping to head it off before it gathered momentum. “And either way, there’s nothing you or I can do about it, Jeanie, so let’s wait and see. You sure you won’t have some lunch? “

“No thanks. The coffee is enough.”

Carl and Jeanie arrived at the hospital center about fifteen minutes before her appointment with the coroner and she parked her car in the visitors lot. At the central lobby information desk, they were told where to find the Pathology Conference Room.

They followed the directions and found the room without much difficulty. As Carl tried to push open the locked door, a man about Jeanie’s age approached them from the far end of the corridor. Carl judged the man who was dressed in a slightly wrinkled, light colored sports jacket and dark polyester slacks, to be about the same size as Frank. The man had a large ring of keys in his right hand with one key held between his thumb and index finger ready to insert in the lock.

“You must be Mrs. Madison,” he said to Jeanie as he turned the key, unlocking the door. “And you, sir?”

“I’m Jeanie’s father,” Carl replied.

“I’m Allen Hartung, the assistant coroner,” the man said, as he allowed Jeanie and Carl to precede him into a small windowless office, “and I’d like to explain a few things before we go into the next room. Won’t you have a seat?

“You read the newspaper story, so you know why our office is involved. The body had been dead for some time before it was discovered and we have to establish the cause of death.

“There is extensive decomposition,” he explained, “but we were able to take some fingerprints. We have no report as yet. These things can take time.”

As he spoke, the assistant coroner passed the large ring of keys from his left hand to the right, back and forth.

“The pathologist will perform an autopsy this afternoon to determine the cause of death,” he continued. “We expect to see a preliminary report in a day or so.”

The young man explained, looking at Jeanie as he spoke, that seeing a cadaver can be traumatic “I should caution you, Mrs. Madison, because of the decomposition, the body may not be immediately recognizable as your husband. So if there are any identification marks such as scars or tattoos you can tell us about, it would help.”

“Ex-husband,” Jeanie said, correcting the assistant coroner as she grabbed onto her father’s arm in a way she hadn’t in years. “And I can’t think of any thing else that might be of help right now,” she said. “Why don’t we go in and get this over with?”

As Jeanie was speaking, a young woman, dressed in operating room scrub greens and cap, and a long white coat, entered the room.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Madison one final thing,” the young man continued, “when it is the remains of a loved one, we usually have a nursing staff member accompany us in the event you should need help. That’s why Miss Morrow is here.”

Carl and Jeanie acknowledged the nurse, rose and accompanied her through a set of double doors, held open by the assistant coroner. They entered a large fluorescent-lit, windowless chamber glistening with stainless steel. The corpse reposed on a gurney, a wheeled table, neatly draped with a light blue coverlet, in the center of the room. To the left of the table, a large stainless steel scale, like the scale in the vegetable section of a supermarket, was suspended on a chain from the ceiling. Red letters across the white face of the scale cautioned: Not Legal For Trade.

As Jeanie and her father approached the table, time appeared to drag and movement took on an exaggerated slow motion for Jeanie and she found it hard to take her eyes off the scale. Its cold, businesslike intrusion into the space of the room, lulled her into thinking that as long as she focused her attention on it, she would not have to deal with the draped table and the corpse it offered. The words Not Legal For Trade intrigued her. Why not? she thought. All of a sudden, Jeanie wanted to light a cigarette, and as she reached for the pack in her handbag, she realized she was stalling, trying to avoid the thing she had come here to do. Her distraction was interrupted by the gentle voice of the assistant coroner calling “Mrs. Madison…Mrs. Madison.”

“Let’s go on,” she said, still clinging to Carl’s right arm and using his strength to keep herself upright. The nurse, standing to Jeanie’s right, quietly glanced at her watch and then into the assistant coroner’s eyes as if to remind him she had other things to do this Friday afternoon before her weekend began.

From the opposite side of the table, Allen Hartung gently withdrew the drape revealing the head and face of the decomposed corpse. It was discolored and ugly to look at. Its disfigurement and the acrid smell of death, wafting up as the sheet was lifted, made Jeanie nauseous. She had never seen a dead body before, except in the sterile serenity of a funeral home. She forced herself not to throw up.

“It’s not him,” she muttered as she threw her arms around her father, “It’s not Frank.”

Carl sat silently in the passenger seat of the aging Honda on the drive back to his house. He was sure that things were not completely over between Jeanie and Frank, at least not yet. But it was a different Jeanie Carl experienced today. This was not the rebellious teenager who eloped with the village drunk. Nor the coke head who came back into his life just in time to see her mother buried.

Carl would have liked to share with Jeanie, under better circumstances, how courageous he felt she was, going through with this ordeal today. How much more mature she had become over the past two years. And how proud it made him feel to see her take such firm command of her life. But Carl knew he couldn’t say these things to his daughter, at least not yet. If it had been Frank today, he thought, Jeanie proved, at least to his satisfaction, she had the mettle to deal with that all by herself. She didn’t need her father along. But, he admitted, he was happy she asked him. Maybe it was a beginning. He hoped it was.

He was grateful, for Jeanie’s sake, the corpse wasn’t Frank’s. Even Frank didn’t deserve to end his days as a naked, decomposing corpse under a drape on a coroner’s table in the bowels of a hospital. No one deserved that indignity. Not Frank, not the John Doe they just saw. Even the John Doe had to be someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father.

When they turned into Carl’s street, Jeanie stopped her car alongside the curb in front of the house and kept the engine running. Carl knew since Jeanie didn’t use the driveway she didn’t want to come in, but he asked her anyway.

“No thanks, Dad,” she said, “I’ve got some stuff to sort out and I might as well get started. Thanks for coming with me today. I really appreciate it.”

Carl got out of the car and watched his daughter drive away. Keep it up Jeanie, you’re going to do just fine, he thought, as he watched the car turned at the corner. Maybe it wasn’t going to be such a long day after all.

THE END