by Tom Robbins
Oh come on, Robbins, that's enough! If you can't play the piano, why don't you just watch TV?
89.
SISSY'S BUS, transportation obtained with money instead of magic—alas, our heroine seems to be following in the footsteps of the modern world—rolled into a sleeping Richmond with the milkmen.
Dawn lay on the chops of the city like a washcloth: still, damp, heavy, warm. By the calendar, summer was more than a week away, but heat had caught up with Richmond; it had the seat of Richmond's pants in its teeth.
Pretty swell pants Richmond was wearing these days, too. In 1973, Richmond had moved ahead of Atlanta, the South's showcase city, in per capita income. Almost everywhere Sissy looked, there were signs of prosperity. New office buildings, factories, apartment houses, schools, shopping centers. It was a bit difficult, sometimes, to distinguish one from the other—the factories and schools were especially similar—but there they were, showing confident faces, one and all, to the rising sun, brighter, cleaner, more solid than any pine groves that had ever stood in their places. More permanent? Well, we'll see.
Industry in the city was much more diversified than in the Eisenhower Years. In fact, several major tobacco firms, including Larus Brothers and Liggett & Meyers had discontinued operations in Richmond, and only Philip Morris, with its mammoth new plant and research center, had ventured any notable expansion. Nevertheless, a golden effluvium still toasted the air of South Richmond. At least, it seemed so to Sissy. Maybe it was merely memory speaking into her nostrils.
Prosperity had not overlooked South Richmond. Only recently, the angel of economic visions had flapped its wings in Sissy's old neighborhood, knocking rickety houses to and fro with each vital beat. Every dwelling in her old block had been condemned and evacuated, in preparation for the demolition that, miraculously, fifty years of domestic brawls had not wrought.
The Hankshaw residence had been boarded up clumsily, like a box hastily readied for some funky Houdini's escape trick. It was a house dead on its feet. It looked like the shell for a termite's taco.
Sissy paid the taxi driver and walked to the front door. By pushing strenuously with her shoulder, she was able to separate boards from nails to the extent that the door opened four or five inches. She looked inside.
Sagging linoleum. Peeling wallpaper. Dust doing its dust dance in the morning light. Nothing to indicate that a man and woman had once lived here in love and hate, had conceived in one of these rooms or the other, three children; one of them a daughter distinguished by a certain anatomical slapstick that had caused the man and woman much embarrassment until the daughter had grown into a teen-ager, in this very house, here, dribbling jam on the floor, pee in the bowl and dreams on the pillows, had grown into a teen-ager and run away, never contacting her family again, sparing them further discomfort, forgotten by them, finally unknown to them except as a monster girl that sometimes crawled into their nightmares. Or so Sissy believed.
Just as she turned to leave, however, a widening shaft of sunlight illuminated a corner, instantly remembered as the corner where her mama's sewing table had long stood, and there, thumbtacked at eye level on the wall were six or eight bright pages ripped from magazines, advertisement pages, pages upon which a tall blond girl, hands mysteriously hidden, posed in various romantic settings, urging the women of the world to purchase a well-known feminine hygiene spray. None other.
90.
IN RICHMOND, it was almost possible not to hear the cake crumbling, smell the bacon burning. A recent magazine article had stated, “Unlike most of the nation, Richmond is thriving.” The economic and psychic depression that was sucking the smile off of the face of Western civilization could barely be noticed in this proud Southern town. Of course, Sissy seldom noticed such things, anyhow. What she did notice, on her homecoming day, was a lot of spiffy new cars, many of them British imports (Richmond being obsessively Anglophilic). She thought that the hitchhiking would be interesting here, perhaps more interesting than in her girlhood—but she wasn't hitching. It was inside another taxi that Sissy rode to the midtown medical building where she remembered that Dr. Dreyfus had had his office.
The office was still there, all right, but it had changed. Whereas on Sissy's first visit there had been two or three tastefully framed prints on the wall, the place now looked more like an art gallery than a doctor's office. Everywhere there were reproductions of Picasso, Bonnard, Renoir, Braque, Utrillo, Dufy, Soutine, Gauguin, Degas, Rousseau, Gris, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Minet, Menet, Munet and others. Many were not framed, but were pinned to the walls in such close proximity that they frequently overlapped, bumping each other like fish in a school. It was as if a survey of modern French painting had gotten mixed up with an aquarium.
The receptionist was away from her desk, so Sissy stared at the tanks full of Gauguin guppies and Picasso triggerfish. Eventually, a woman came in from a rear cubicle to inform Sissy that the office was closed. Closed? Yes. Permanently. Dr. Dreyfus had retired the previous week and the woman was there putting things in order, referring patients to other plastic surgeons, closing the books and so forth.
“I'd be happy to refer you to someone else,” said the woman, who was short, juiceless and gray, like a village school principal's night on the town.
“Only Dr. Dreyfus will do,” Sissy pleaded.
“I'm sorry,” said the woman.
“But if he just retired last week, he could still do one more operation, couldn't he?”
“I'm afraid not,” said the woman. “Not a chance of it.”
“Is he ill or something?”
The woman didn't answer immediately. “That's a matter of opinion,” she sighed at last. “You're not from around Richmond, are you?”
Before Sissy could answer, the woman snapped, “Ma'am, you're wasting your time and mine. Dr. Dreyfus will not be performing any more surgery, and that's definite. Now, if you don't wish a referral, please excuse me. I've got to start taking those fool pictures down. Oh Lord.”
Like a bad habit, another taxi let Sissy fall into it. She gave the cabbie the address the telephone directory had given her. It was in the West End, in one of the better neighborhoods, although not the best. The best neighborhood in Richmond, as in Heaven, is reserved for those of the Christian persuasion.
Dr. Dreyfus himself answered the door. He hadn't changed much, and he remembered Sissy. Rather, he remembered certain parts of Sissy. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have let her in. He had been bothered by journalists, he explained. He didn't inquire why Sissy had called; he seemed to know. “I'm afraid I can't help you,” he said. “Please, child, don't be dismayed. We all have problems these days. But as the painter Van Gogh said, 'Mysteries remain, sorrow or melancholy remains, but the everlasting negative is balanced by the positive work which thus is achieved, after all.' I don't suppose that means very much to you. Here, you read this while I get out of my dressing robe and into my puttering clothes. Some other physician can help you. This will explain why I cannot.”
To his visitor he handed a clipping from a newsprint periodical. “There have been many other articles, but this one says it most objectively.” He left Sissy alone to read:
Frustrated artist blows med career through nose
As a boy in Paris, Felix Dreyfus had dreamed of becoming an artist. An older cousin who was a guide at the Louvre let him tag along on tours, where he acquired a precocious knowledge of art history. Alas, Felix's parents were philistines who constantly deflated the boy's artistic dreams, while grooming him for a career in medicine.
Young Dreyfus gave in, finishing med school with high marks. If his parents saw in his choice of plastic surgery as a medical specialty the remnants of the old artistic urge—plastic surgery is, after all, a rather sculptural, relatively creative discipline—they did not let on.
Emigrating to the U.S. in the Nazi years, Dr. Dreyfus developed a successful practice in Richmond, Va. There, he was fairly active as a patron of the arts, and accumulated an ext
ensive collection of books on painters and sculptors. He married his nurse, and they led a quiet, comfortable life.
Then, last month, Dr. Dreyfus, 66, undertook to perform cosmetic surgery on a 14-year-old boy, Bernard Schwartz. A routine operation, it was to alter the size and shape of the boy's Semitic nose. Although he specialized in injuries to and deformities of the hands, Dr. Dreyfus had successfully completed many "nose jobs."
When the bandages were removed from Bernie Schwartz's proboscis, however, the boy's horrified parents were gaping at what has been called "the most scandalous incident of deliberate malpractice in the recent history of medicine."
Succumbing, maniacally, to his suppressed artistic drives, Dr. Felix Dreyfus, disdaining marble, clay and plaster to work in living flesh, had sculptured upon the face of little Bernie Schwartz the world's first Cubistic nose!
Bernie's new nose had six nostrils, two in front, two on each side, and three bridges, so that in either profile it looked as if you were seeing it frontally. According to the exuberant Dr. Dreyfus, Bernie's nose is "simultaneously viewed from several aspects, all the aspects overlapping, so that what we have is a nose in totality, and that totality manages to suggest motion, even when static; it shatters the classical idea of the face in which the nose is fixed and unchanging; it is a nose in a perpetual state of ultimate noseness, yet it is on the very verge of the abstract."
Dr. Dreyfus's enthusiasm may be short-lived. The Virginia Medical Board has suspended his license, and it is reported that the surgeon may be permitted to retire as an alternative to being barred permanently from practice. Bernie's parents, unconvinced by the creator's glowing aesthetic evaluation of his work, are suing Dr. Dreyfus for three million dollars. Moreover, the "masterpiece" is doomed. As soon as medically feasible, a team of plastic surgeons in Washington, D.C., will restore the world's first Cubistic nose to a realistic style that promises to please even devotees of Norman Rockwell. Meanwhile, Bernie Schwartz spends a lot of time indoors.
When Dr. Dreyfus returned, rather sheepishly, to the living room, Sissy rushed to embrace him. She was smiling for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. “Oh, Doctor!” she cried. “You've got to do it. You and nobody else should be allowed to take away my gift.”
91.
"AH THE THUMB," mused Dr. Dreyfus, yawning his small eyes so that they might take in the full length and breadth of Sissy's prodigious pucky-wucks. “The thumb, yes. The thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb. One of evolution's most ingenious inventions; a built-in tool sensitive to texture, contour and temperature: an alchemical lever; the secret key to technology; the link between the mind and art; a humanizing device. The marmoset and the lemur are thumbless; none of the New World monkeys has opposable thumbs; the spider monkey's thumbs are absent or reduced to a tiny tubercle; the thumbs of the potto are set at an angle of one hundred eighty degrees to the other digits, making them nonfunctional except as pinchers; the orangutan, which is humanlike to the extent that it is called the 'man of the woods,' has a thumb so tiny in relation to its extremely long curved fingers that its manipulation is only nominal; the thumb of the chimpanzee opposes the bent fingers in a clumsy action, and the gorilla lacks a grip precise enough to hold small objects; the baboon comes close—its thumbs are fully opposable and it has a good precision grip—but have you ever observed the thumb of the baboon, how flat and splay-headed and crudely shaped it is; no, there is but one true thumb on this planet and homo sapiens has got it."
Pause.
“And so you are demanding at last the privileges of thumb that nature has perversely denied you?”
“I just want to be normal,” said Sissy. “Give me that old-fashioned normality. It was good enough for Crazy Horse and it's good enough for me.”
“Ah yes,” said Dr. Dreyfus, smiling weakly, like a duck in dishwater, too embarrassed to quack. “Very well, my dear. Here is what we can do.
“Full normality, whatever that may exactly be, is out of the question. But out of the question comes the answer, so to speak. If your thumb bone—actually, two phalanx metacarpal bones—if your thumb bones were of normal size, then we could merely cut away the excess tissue and sew your thumb inside of your chest for a while, for a skin graft, you see. Then you'd have thumbs that were normal in appearance as well as in function. However, as I recall, your thumb bones are enlarged in proportion to the whole. That makes it more complicated. That calls for pollicerization. One thing a surgeon cannot do is reduce volume of bone. Bone can be shortened but not reduced in size. So. In pollicerization, we make a thumb out of your index finger. We shorten the bone of the index finger, alter its angle and move it over. After a time, it becomes a completely acceptable thumb. But your hands, you realize, would still not be quite normal, because they'd have only four digits a piece. Your present thumbs—there certainly is a peculiar glow about them—would, of course, have to be amputated.”
What??? Feel faint. Ooooo, dizzy. Sick to the tummy. A startle of fishes in the seas of the abdomen. A thick black toxin spews from the heart to numb the teeth. Sissy suffers shortness of breath. The author's own fingers tremble on the keys. Amputation. A leaden word. A word with a built-in echo and a built-in ache. A word off Dr. Guillotine's workbench. A lump in God's gravy. Can thumbs understand the word “amputate” the way whooping cranes understand the word “extinct"?
Felix Dreyfus offered the shaken Sissy a glass of sherry. She declined. Probably not a dram of Ripple in the whole West End. In lieu of alcoholic stimulant, then, the good doctor administered the tonic of conspiracy.
“This will be a risky escapade,” he confided, “but I'm old now and can afford to take risks. I'll not run from Nazis ever again. My brother-in-law is a surgeon. Ha! Some surgeon. He couldn't cut the pimento out of a stuffed olive. He ought to have a red and white striped pole outside of his office. He's employed by the Veterans' Administration. Only the government would hire such a boob. Well, as our luck would have it, he's in residence at O'Dwyre VA Hospital over in South Richmond. I'll have him schedule you for surgery. He owes me thousands; he'll do what I say. Then I'll show up to 'assist' with the operations. I'll use an assumed name. Nobody at O'Dwyre will be the wiser. They're understaffed, outmoded, incompetent and corrupt. The follow-up work I can do here at home. Faintly ingenious, yes? Against all rules, but as the painter Delacroix said, 'There are no rules for great souls: rules are only for people who have merely the talent that can be acquired.' But I don't suppose that means much to you.”
92.
ONCE, a young woman was admitted to a hospital, and no birds sang.
Once, blood was analyzed in a laboratory, and no birds sang.
Once, powerful lamps were turned on in an operating room, and no birds sang.
Once, IV tubes were inserted in veins, and no birds sang.
Once, a young woman was wheeled into surgery, and no birds sang.
Once, an anesthesiologist stuck a needle into a curved and creamy ass, and no birds sang.
Once, an anesthesiologist stuck needles into a long, graceful neck, and no birds sang.
Once, a nurse scrubbed an arm for ten full minutes, and no birds sang.
Once, a body and a table were draped with sheets to create a sterile field, and no birds sang.
Once, a tourniquet was placed on a slender right arm, and no birds sang.
Once, an elastic rubber bandage was applied so tightly it squeezed most of the blood out of an arm, and no birds sang.
Once, a tourniquet was inflated, and not a single ornithological peep was heard.
Once, a surgeon outlined in iodine an incision around the base of a thumb, and still no birds were singing.
Once, pale smooth skin was incised along a premarked line and dissected down to the bone, while silence prevailed in treetop and nest.
Once, arteries and veins were divided and tied, and a nerve was separated and allowed to detract into a wound, without an accompanying warble or whistle or tweet.
Once, a joint was opened, and it wasn't a new roadhouse nor were any of our fine feathered friends chirping there.
Once, a tendons were cut, snapped and allowed to retract like rubber bands, a sound that could not have been mistaken for a meadowlark or a thrush.
Once, a metacarpal bone was fractured with a saw, a task that, due to the unusual size of the particular bone, required such exertion on the part of the surgeon that he could not have heard any birds if they were singing, which they weren't.
Once, a drain was placed in a wound, and not so much as a sparrow opened its mouth.
Once, a woman flesh was sewn shut with four-ought nylon suture, and the beaks of the birds must have been sewn shut, too.
Once, a pressure dressing was applied to a hand, but no amount of pressure could induce the birds to sing.
Once, a tourniquet was deflated, a bloody arm bathed, and a numb young woman rolled to a recovery room, four fingers showing from a bandage and not one of them pointing to the silent skies.
Once, a nurse and two surgeons, their attention directed by an intensifying pinkish glow, turned to stare into a metal pan, where a huge human thumb, disarticulated from the hand it had served (in its fashion), was now flopping about like a trout—no! not flopping aimlessly in breathless panic but, rather, arching and thrusting itself in a calculated and endlessly repeated gesture, the international gesture of the hitchhike, as if, to avoid troubling the world with its great white grief, it was trying to flag a ride On Out of Here.
And no birds sang.
93.
THE SKY was as tattered as a Gypsy's pajamas. Through knife holes in the flannel overcast, July sunlight spilled, causing Sissy's eyes to blink when she stepped outside the long, dark corridors of O'Dwyre VA Hospital. The air was so humid, she felt orchids growing in her armpits.