Rudolfinerhaus is a private hospital in Vienna, a costly institution serving affluent Viennese patients and foreigners wary of socialized medicine. In June, T. S. Garp goes there to see Charlotte, a former intimate who is dying. His visit makes the hospital a place where wealth can purchase a private room and intensive care, but cannot keep death at bay; after Charlotte dies, the institution’s orderly routines offer Garp no comfort or recognition.

Setting and character

Rudolfinerhaus stands in Vienna’s nineteenth district, near Grinzing and the Vienna Woods, in a suburban landscape of cobbled streets and trees. Garp, unfamiliar with the area, rides the No. 38 Strassenbahn too far along Grinzinger Allee and walks back to the corner of Billrothstrasse and Rudolfinergasse to reach the hospital. The route places the visit away from the more familiar urban setting of the city’s prostitution district.

The hospital’s old stone walls are the same Maria Theresa yellow as Schönbrunn Palace and the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Its gardens are enclosed in a courtyard of its own. In a city organized around socialized medicine, Rudolfinerhaus offers private treatment at prices comparable to those of almost any hospital in the United States. It does not normally supply pajamas: its patients are accustomed to bringing their own nightclothes. The detail conveys a form of care shaped by means and preference, rather than by the standard provision of a public institution.

Patients and privilege

When Garp visits in June, Rudolfinerhaus appears to him to hold several kinds of patient at once. It is full of young mothers who have recently given birth and well-off people who have come to recover from serious illness. It also accommodates affluent patients who, like Charlotte, have come there to die. The juxtaposition of birth, attempted recovery, and terminal illness gives the hospital a wider significance than a setting for one visit: its rooms contain different stages of life, while the privilege of being there cannot determine which outcome a patient faces.

Charlotte has a private room and remarks that she no longer has reason to save her money. Garp recognizes the seriousness of her condition when he sees her. She has lost nearly thirty pounds, and her rings remain only on her index and middle fingers because her other fingers have become too small to hold them. Her illness has involved extensive operations and the removal of parts of her body; a tube in her throat leaves her able to swallow only liquids for part of each day. Garp brings fruit chosen with knowledge of her tastes from their earlier shopping together, but she cannot eat it. The hospital makes their former familiarity visible alongside the bodily limits that illness has imposed.

Charlotte’s final days

During the visit, Charlotte speaks to Garp about what has been removed and about her uncertainty over the extent of the surgery. She also expresses gratitude for having money to afford what she calls a Class A place. Her remark brings the hospital’s private status into the room: wealth has provided her with this degree of care and privacy, but neither it nor the room can reverse her illness. Garp is moved to tears. Charlotte tells him not to behave like a baby and asks what she is to him, while the hospital chart gives him her age: fifty-one.

Charlotte dies a week later. When Garp returns, her room has been cleaned, the bed stripped, and the windows opened. A nurse in charge of the floor does not recognize the name Garp gives and explains that the doctor has many patients. Garp does not know Charlotte’s real name, so he identifies her by her former occupation. The nurse finally confirms that the prostitute is dead. The exchange reduces Charlotte, at the moment of her death, to an occupational label; Garp answers the nurse with a bitter prediction that she, too, will die.

Narrative significance

Rudolfinerhaus brings together the novel’s recurring concerns with nursing, bodily vulnerability, and death in a sharply defined social setting. Elsewhere, Jenny Fields’s experience in intensive care includes terminal patients and soldiers whose injuries resist ordinary classifications. At Rudolfinerhaus, by contrast, the narrative emphasizes the hospital’s private character, the expense of treatment, and the different reasons its wealthy patients have come there. These medical scenes share an attention to the body, but the hospital’s class distinction makes access and comfort part of the description as well.

The visit also gives Garp a setting in which care cannot mean cure. He knows what Charlotte likes and brings her fruit, yet her illness prevents her from eating it; after her death, even the hospital room’s thorough clearing cannot preserve a place for her in its routine. His anger at the nurse’s cool response registers the gap between institutional procedure and personal loss. Rudolfinerhaus is thus not simply a backdrop for Charlotte’s final illness: its privacy and expense frame the limits of what money, medical care, and remembered intimacy can accomplish in the face of death.