I’ve been coming through a rather bad patch. For more than two weeks I was dogged by some bronchial infection that grew worse rather than better and eventually turned alarming. Wheezing and gasping for breath, I had to be hauled off to the hospital in the night. It was a pretty scary episode for others as well as for me. But at the hospital they quickly stuck little oxygen tubes into each nostril, effecting instant relief. The not entirely satisfactory diagnosis was “pneumonial something,” which responded rapidly to large intervenous infusions of antibiotics. That was the good news, and very good news it was. But of course once you are actually in the hospital with the little yellow plastic band around your wrist, you are in a world in which you have surrendered all agency, and in which about the only possible demonstration of volition available to you is to wait with dignity. I was anxious to get home. The hospital authorities were eager to have me leave as soon as possible, but that would be prudent only after certain numbers went up or down, when then wheezing became tolerable, when the sputum changed color, and when other disconcerting physical signs and portents had realigned in a more medically approvable fashion.
The Princeton-Penn Hospital to which I was admitted is a wonderful facility probably less than two miles from my house. It was built featuring only spacious single rooms. That was about fifteen years ago, but very soon its capacity was being stretched to the limit. Now there are two beds in most of the rooms—perhaps all of them. The rooms are so laid out that only one bed enjoys a widow view. The tradeoff for the advantage of the window view, which I enjoyed, is marginalization between a curtain in a narrow section of the back of the room. You hear all the comings and goings of the hallway, but you feel squeezed into what seems like the breadth of a corridor. So you spend a lot time exploiting your privilege: looking out the window. As I had a lot of time on my hands, I made a good deal out of this task. The visual materials, though abundant, were dull and commonplace with virtually no possibility for scoping out a homicide, which was the model that came uninvited into my mind.
I don’t have a great memory for movies, but one I do remember, in parts vividly, is Rear Window. It dates from my senior year in high school, 1954. This thriller is one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces. It stars Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. The Stewart character is a photojournalist (Jeff Jefferies) temporarily confined to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment by a serious injury—maybe a car accident. From his window he has a constricted view of the world, though one that turns out to be amazingly crowded and dramatic. He actually thinks he sees, and indeed had seen, clues to a murder. A man in a neighboring apartment building has murdered his wife! It takes Jeff a while to develop his theory of what has happened, suppositions he shares with a girlfriend who drops by from time to time. Needless to say, perhaps, the homicidal hubby eventually comes to realize that Jeff is on his case and sets out to remove this inconvenience in the same way he has already removed his missus. No plot summary can do justice to a Hitchcock film. If you haven’t seen Rear Window you’ll simply have to take my word for it that it’s witty, scary, and very suspenseful. For starters, we don’t have too many Stewarts or Kellys on our silver screens these days. And the villain-guy is wonderfully villainous.
From my window all I could see in the foreground were the flat roofs of various hospital buildings, small portions of the huge hospital parking lot, and beyond that some scruffy winter-barren trees. Although I knew where each individual item belonged in the landscape, I still was uncertain as to where I was positioned in terms of my view. But I knew I had to be facing northeast. The moving traffic glimpsed through the trees was on Scudder’s Mill Road, the large artery linking the village of Plainsboro to Route One. Directly across that road, facing me frontally square on was a large building prominently marked at its top in large majuscule letters: LIFE TIME. That was, indeed, the only written sign I could see in that large and expansive view.
LIFE TIME. I am too much of a medievalist not to respond to the little pinches and gentle pushes that Providence serves up for me from time—and has been doing on an infrequent but reliable schedule for more than eighty years. I knew of course that Life Time is a large public gymnasium on the Plainsboro Road. And while “Life Time” is a possibly ambiguous phrase—one would not want to hear it in a court sentence, for sure—it seemed to me in this instance a wholly benign portent, the exact meaning of which, though unclear, was still comforting. And there it was beckoning me from my hospital bed.
It is amazing what even a hum-drum landscape may reveal upon close observation. I saw a pair of foxes slithering through the brush, a few hundred yards at most from heavy car traffic. The sky was full of bird life, flocks of darting, choreographed starlings, and a plodding convoy of heavy Canada geese overflying the busy traffic of US 1. Such are the strange accommodations the hidden world of the struggling wild must make to our human-cluttered landscape.
