Grandee

James Reidel

The gurney is lifted gingerly. Some of us wave to our neigh-

bor. Some call out encouragements. He sits upright as

though in a sedan chair, with a certain stiffness that lends

him an unsteady dignity, bearing, a noblesse that is catching, 

such that his first responders, in their black uniforms, wear 

the livery of a retinue, a private little army for which 911 is 

called to be carried out like that. They work his litter through

the front door and over the threshold. They sidestep a cast-

iron dado his wife planted with petunias. Then comes the 

steep pitch of the front steps and what looks like apprehen-

sion takes hold of our aristocrat. For a moment he clutches 

the crisp white sheet folded over a blanket as thought to take 

it with him were he to fall out and be seen as old, fat, even 

naked below the waist, and whiter. But after the last step he 

is the grandee again, making his way through the narrow 

streets of some old walled city, with a fringed canopy for 

shade, with little curtains to draw on some unpleasant odor 

or the sight of a ruined face, the kind one sees after plague

or pox, after coming back from the countryside. He could 

almost be on his way to a counting house, the law courts, to 

petition a prince, an archbishop, perhaps a prince arch-

bishop. He could be paying his mistress a visit. This is how 

he might take her to the theater, where a box was draped 

with his arms, also painted on the chair’s doors. I can almost 

read his lips from afar. It will be something to entertain the 

EMTs because they are so young, something old hat, some-

thing that needlessly dates and lowers him, something like 

my late father said, that he was “sorry to have interrupted 

the card game at the firehouse” before that same metal snap, 

which we all just heard, got his attention, when the wheels 

can at last be released on the driveway, when the scissor legs 

of the gurney spring open, crash down, and lock in place.