Journal

One blustery September afternoon I entered the main office after lunch to find a woman in her midforties waiting to see me. Her plea was straightforward. “Please help me,” she said.

I was disturbed by her appearance: so ill, so wretched, that inwardly I ruminated that had I been her doctor, I would have been ashamed to allow one who appeared so ill to leave the hospital. She had been coming everyday for radiation treatment, she now seemed completely exhausted. My first thought was to get her to bed, for if I took her to Emergency, it would take hours before the doctors could see her, and even then they might not admit her.

“Let me take you home,” I said, for I knew that she lived a few blocks away at the Martha Washington Hotel. I hailed a taxi and in a few minutes we were in front of her residence, one of those rare hotels exclusively for women, once quite comfortable, genteel in its day, now slipping towards shabbiness and indecorous senility like some of its occupants. Antonia protested that I needn’t come in with her. But I paid the cabdriver and assisted her up the stairs, into the lobby and into the elevator. As we walked the corridor to her room, we came upon several ladies, dressed no doubt for afternoon tea.

The maid greeted Antonia very nicely, but I caught sight of the shocked expression on her face at Antonia’s appearance.

Antonia unlocked the door to her room.

“I’m so sorry for the mess. Please excuse the mess.”

“There’s no need to apologize when you’ve been so sick,” I said. “Why don’t you go into the bathroom, get ready for bed, and I’ll fix up your bed.”

As quickly as I could, I straightened and freshened the bed, smoothed the sheets, hung up the clothes that were draped over the bedposts and chairs, then helped her into the bed, made certain that she was comfortably tucked in.

“How can I thank you?” she said.

“I’m going to ask the maid to see that you get some hot food later. Try to rest.”

The maid was concerned; she had not seen Miss Sammarco in weeks, knew that she had been in the hospital. I asked if there were friends on the floor who could look in on her, bring her food. She assured me that she would see to it that Antonia would get the help that she needed.

Weeks later the receptionist handed me the name of a gentleman who wished to see me. The name on the slip of paper meant nothing to me until he told me that he was Antonia Sammarco’s brother. A quiet, modest man in an ill-fitting suit. I ushered him into one of the cubicles, where we could speak.

“When I cleaned out my sister’s hotel room, I found a journal that she kept. Did you know about the journal?”

“No, she never mentioned it to me,” I said.

“I found your name in the journal, that was how I knew about you. She referred to you as though you were the one person with whom she had had some warm, human contact.”

“She had worked at her job for eleven years — was it? Did she have any friends at work?”

“Not that she ever mentioned to me,”

“She told me that you and your wife came to take her out to dinner one evening, after she was discharged from the hospital.”

“She couldn’t even eat; she was too sick then.”

He seemed to be struggling with what he had learned now that she was dead, a realization of something that he had not known nor understood.

“At least she knew that you cared enough to see her, to take her out.”

With that we stood up, and he thanked me for helping his sister and left.

I stood there, nagged by a sense of things incomplete.

Had he wanted me to ask to see the journal? Did he perhaps want my comments on its revelations? I had the sense that he might have been shocked at what it revealed. Lonely people can be bitter and spew out expressions that seem unmitigatedly harsh on the naked page, particularly when we are accustomed to the timid masks of those who live alone, dress neatly, work nine to five and keep their emotions to themselves.

Had she been hurt as a young woman, rejected by a young man, then retreated to the Martha Washington, protected by the austerity of that atmosphere that permitted men in the lobby only? Fear and loneliness stamp the lives of so many of the single people who live in large cities. Having sought privacy and independence, what they sometimes encountered was brutality and coldness and little by little some withdrew into solitary office positions in a large company, one that offered no challenge and slight satisfaction.

Had the people who worked with her thought her odd — remote — strange? Had they eventually avoided her, as she avoided them, so that my simple gesture was noted as the one human contact she had known?