‘It’s a bandeau,’ she told him, and stood back for him to get a good look at it. ‘You like it?’
‘It looks peachy to me,’ he said.
‘I got it out of a magazine,’ she said. ‘It’s what Mrs Vanderbilt wears.’
‘Oh, hey — I bet it looks better on you than on Mrs Vanderbilt,’ he said.
‘I’d hardly say that.’
‘I would,’ he said soberly. He remembered from somewhere a picture of Mrs Vanderbilt walking toward a Rolls-Royce touring car, and do you believe it, Rose did indeed look a little like Mrs Vanderbilt, but a Mrs Vanderbilt the merest breath would blow away. ‘You know, you do look like Mrs Vanderbilt?’
‘Honestly?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, and you think so, too.’
‘Now you know my little secret.’ That little band around her head was her badge.
‘You tell ’em, I stutter!’ he said. That’s what they all said then. And Johnny laughed.
But when a few nights later she agreed to marry him, her eyes shining and her lips parted slightly like one who knows she is about to be kissed, tears suddenly sprung into his eyes; he felt his life, whatever that might be, was in-complete without her, and he was afraid. Afraid for her, or for himself? He couldn’t tell.
‘All I can say to you, young man,’ her father remarked, ‘is always be good to her.’
‘I assure you, sir, I always shall,’ Johnny said.
‘The first time you called,’ her father said, frowning, ‘you were a little under the influence.’
‘You’re a perceptive man, sir,’ Johnny said. ‘I admit to that charge. I took a drink to give me confidence.’
‘Liquor is a poor thing.’
‘It’s just a medicine, sir,’ Johnny said, ‘if you use it right.’
He was not asked to remain at the hospital when his internship was up; he knew he would not be asked, and yet he was disappointed; but the fact might have pointed up to him his tenuous connection with reality. He felt that if he had met Rose earlier, and put his shoulder to the wheel, as he phrased it, he would have been asked to remain. Why, until he met Rose, he had just gone through the motions, so to speak, or so it seemed to the director.
‘But I’ll say one thing for you, John,’ said the director, and looked across the skull he kept on his desk. ‘I have eyes and I have ears, and I know you’re probably one of the most naturally kind young fellows I’ve ever known.’
‘Kind?’ Johnny asked. ‘Kind? I never noticed, sir, that I was kind.’
‘Maybe not,’ the director said, smoking his pipe as Johnny wished he could smoke one — with authority. ‘That’s why I said naturally kind. It proceeds, these new psychiatrist fellows tell me, from a certain sensitivity. And —’
‘And what, sir?’
‘We sometimes have to control sensitivity. Can be dangerous. Not sure it’s a trait especially valuable to a doctor. Shame, but there it is.’
‘Then what should I do, sir, about getting a job?’
‘Some small town, John. Some small town, till you get on your feet.’
It embarrassed him to be called John. He didn’t feel like John. He felt like Johnny, and maybe that was his trouble, for who trusts the Johnnys of the world, they who skip through life laughing and crying, but always skipping.
He found the small town. This was it — Beech. This town of which he so often said, ‘We never should have moved here in the first place.’ And then Rose would look at him.
It had seemed so possible as a place where a young doctor not so sure of himself might settle and make a living. It was on the railroad. He had put Rose up in the hotel in Herndon, the county seat, twenty-five miles north, while he inquired around Beech, and everybody seemed enthusiastic about having a doctor.
‘Not for twenty-five years,’ they told him in the saloon.
‘That’s a long time,’ Johnny said.
Oh, they told him of the dryland farmers off behind the hill that slipped down to the town, and about the big ranches to the west. They told of talk that a spur of the Northern Pacific might come through and meet the Union Pacific. Beech at the junction was bound to grow, they said. Not months before, they said, surveyors had been working with their instruments, and what a fine bunch of young men they were!
Caught up in the enthusiasm generated in the saloon, Johnny bought another round of drinks for his new friends, and they all toasted a future so vast it left him breathless, vast as the land outside. And what about living quarters for him and his wife?
He had a wife? Now, that was a good thing.
He brought out her picture.
Well, he was fortunate indeed. ‘Strikes me,’ the bartender said, ‘you might take a look at the old hotel. The Inn, used to be called.’
A small hotel of six small identical rooms on the second floor, each with an iron bed, washstand, closet and neat coiled rope beside each window in case of fire. The Inn had been abandoned long enough to have got the reputation among the schoolchildren of being haunted; they had seen lights, they had seen faces at the windows. One of the bolder among them had shied a stone through an upper window, and told how he heard a kind of scream. Especially when the moonlight fell against the weathered brown clapboards, brightened the windows and picked out the bleached white deer horns over the sign that said the inn — especially then it seemed haunted.
But in the sunlight it looked solid and innocent enough; the windmill that stuck up out of the roof of the shed behind lent the place a practical air, and it seemed to Johnny that until he had established his practice, they might run the place as an inn again — have two strings to their bow. Impractical, was he?
The bank in Herndon owned the property, and he came almost at once to terms with the fellow there. The legacy of the aunt who had wanted him to study medicine covered the initial payment and bought him the secondhand Ford motorcar he’d need for his rounds. Enough remained to furnish an office in one of the rooms on the second floor. A clever metal chair collapsed into an examination table; a human skeleton grinned in a glass case.
Now he was doing the last necessary thing. ‘Come on over here and look, Rose,’ he said. Smiling, he watched her rise from her knees beside the building where she planted California poppies — one of the few flowers, they said, that thrived in the cranky, sour soil. He still held in his hand the spade he’d used to dig a hole for the post and top-piece, a kind of gibbet that displayed the sign he’d planed and sanded and painted and attached to the top-piece by four eye screws so that it swung free.
JOHN GORDON, M.D.
‘My, but there’s so much wind here,’ she said, watching the sign swing, ‘but I hardly hear it now. Oh yes, that does look nice.’
‘You get used to the wind,’ he said, ‘after a while.’ Then they went back inside and set to, cleaning up. Lysol and plenty of good hot soap and water put to flight old ghosts.
His son he delivered himself. He himself took his blessed son from the mother’s womb, and together they erred in attaching to the child the faintly epicene name of Peter because it had belonged to Rose’s father, and that burly man had become Pete.
Johnny thought he had never seen a lovelier sight than his wife lying in the bed, nursing the child; he waited on her, sat beside her and read to her from Byron, enchanted by the wonder and beauty of birth. How everybody congratulated him, and how straight he sat at the wheel of the Ford motorcar, grinning and handing out cigars. Once having caught sight of his own face in a mirror, he continued to stare at himself, thinking. He thought how it was that whenever she looked up from whatever it was she was doing, she always smiled. He wondered if anybody had ever noticed that before.
The poppies bloomed, withered and died; the winter wind screamed down from the distant mountains, and then again the ground was bare of snow, the poppies pushed up and bloomed again, withered and died. Although they did not speak of it to each other, the Gordons were disturbed that the blond little boy was late in walking and late in talking, and when
at last he walked — and that was a day! — he walked with a stiff, mechanical gait that depended little on the use of the knee, a gait that hinted that walking was a painfully acquired skill and not a human instinct. And when at last he talked, the boy astounded them by speaking with a faint lisp in measured, adult cadences that assured them he was advanced and not retarded in spite of his slightly enlarged forehead, his wide, innocent eyes, and a disquieting habit of seeming to listen to the distance. At four he was able to read.
Johnny soon learned a curious fact that at first did not trouble him: when the big ranchers and their wives and families needed a doctor, they drove to Herndon and combined the visit with shopping, dinner at the Herndon House or the Sugar Bowl Cafe. They liked to sit in the big green leather chairs in the hotel lobby and greet friends, gaze out the big plate-glass windows at the townspeople on God knows what errands, and at their own motorcars nudging the curb out front; they liked to take a slow turn about the town, marvel at the neatness of the huge lawn that fanned out before the yellow brick Gothic courthouse and the jail behind where the sheriff kept his pet drunks and vagrants; they savored the tree-lined streets in the residential district, stood awed and embarrassed before the rubber trusses in the drugstore window, walked to the station to see the train pull in and stop. How the earth trembled! How the steam deafened! Then back to the Herndon House where they took a room with a bath, indulged in all that luxury, and smiled, anticipating the moving picture show later in the evening. There was no such luxury at The Inn, no such excitement in Beech, there where the wind howled. Nor is it relaxing to stop at a place that smells of despair and failure.
In all the years that Johnny Gordon practiced in Beech he was faithful, totally faithful, to the Hippocratic oath, and never refused a call for help whether he got a fee or not; his patients were the dryland farmers behind the hills whose lives somehow paralleled his; they had been lured West by colored handbills printed by the railroads, promised cheap land which God knew was there and rain God knew was not. Only the big ranchers who controlled the creeks and the river thrived. But at least the dryland farmers, the Norwegians, Swedes and Austrians, could fail in clean surroundings.
‘By golly, Rose,’ Johnny used to say, ‘but they sure all are clean. Why, you could eat off the floor. Drive on out with me one of these days, and we’ll picnic.’
Him they summoned to set broken bones, arms torn and shattered by the teeth of circular saws. Clumsy former city-dwellers, they were kicked in the groin by horses and cows. Their wives gave birth. When Johnny arrived in his Ford motorcar, they had the water boiling so he could clean his instruments; he laughed and complimented them on the babies he pulled forth raging or whimpering at the world around them; sitting at scrubbed kitchen tables, he celebrated with the fathers, joked to draw attention from their women’s suffering. ‘Why does Uncle Sam wear red-white-and-blue suspenders?’ Singing, he went careening back to Beech with a gallon or two of chokecherry wine in the back of the Ford. ‘They’ll pay up when they can,’ he reassured Rose. And they did, when they could.
But now the sign with his name that hung from the gibbet before The Inn had so weathered it was unreadable; the bleached deer horns over the entrance fell one night of the wind; The Inn itself wanted painting, but inside all was desperately clean, the windows shone. It was not Johnny’s fees but the drummers passing through with their lines of dry goods and notions, it was the occasional cattle-buyer who stopped for the night and took a meal — it was they who paid the bills.
Peter suffered not only the gamut of childhood diseases but also a myriad of chills and fevers that sapped his strength and left his arms and legs nothing but the merest crust of bone around the vulnerable marrow. Johnny wondered if people might not take his son’s constant ailments as a reflection on his own abilities, and if there were not perhaps some paradox in the ancient books — along with that of the shoemaker’s child — that the doctor’s son is always sick. But Peter never complained nor demanded, and dutifully handled the toys his parents pressed on him. He learned early what it is to be an outcast and looked on living with deepset, expressionless eyes that saw everything or nothing. He played no ballgames, preferred books and solitude, had an aversion to sunlight and on going out into it always paused, squinted, and shaded his eyes.
People blew out their lamps early in Beech — a single puff down the chimney — and so their world was left to the single light behind a sickroom window, to the pale, flickering flames behind the glass in the switches near the railroad station, and sometimes to the moon. It was then Peter liked to leave the house.
‘What were you doing?’ Rose would ask, or Johnny, and always Peter answered, Nothing.
Nothing, and they took nothing to mean he walked, walked to nowhere. But once the clock in the kitchen moved around and around until two hours passed and Johnny was seized with sudden panic, a twisting in the region of his bowels; for fifteen minutes he sat paring his nails, afraid to communicate his queer terror to Rose. ‘I think I’ll take a walk out and see what he’s up to,’ Johnny said.
The land was flat and bright with the moon whose beams caught in the early dew on the sagebrush and defined a path ahead like moon on water; he could think of nothing that might beckon the boy but the river, and nothing on the bank of the river but the single huddle of willows. There the boy must be. If he was not there, well, what? As he approached the willows, he slowed his steps.
And there he found the boy, found him sitting with his back against the willows nearest the river where, in the middle, the water parted, disturbed and glittering, around a stump that caught in a sandbar, and the rippling murmur perhaps swallowed up Johnny’s careful footfalls, for the boy sat motionless, his face caught in the cool radiance, his bony temple casting a shadow that hid his deepset eyes like a domino. Sensing he was intruding on some mystery, Johnny hesitated. Just so had he hesitated on the several occasions when he’d come on the boy regarding himself in the wavy mirror that hung over the washbasin; Johnny could not tell from the level expression of the eyes whether the boy was searching for something, judging himself, or simply seeking companionship in his own image, and when the boy turned, it was without embarrassment — he seemed unaware of the strangeness or wrongness or whatever it was; it was Johnny who felt the prickles of guilt, and he wanted to share the burden of the several incidents with Rose, but each time he kept silent.
Now something in the fall of the cloth of the coat the boy wore, something in the shadow that obscured the boy’s expression and the half-web of black willows that spread fanlike above him suggested the religious, a monk engaged in prayer. Johnny was struck with the idea that perhaps the boy’s habitual remoteness was not the detachment of the doctor or scientist but the withdrawal of the mystic, the priest. When he spoke, Johnny was struck with the impropriety of his own voice. ‘Peter?’
‘I was coming right back.’ Unsurprised.
‘I wondered what you were doing.’
‘I was watching.’
‘Watching?’
‘The moon.’
As poultry in the pen pecks to death the maimed or strange among them, so at school was Peter hazed, taunted and named a sissy — the hiss of the word was everywhere. But only when they named his father a drunk did he turn on them. Quicker than he, they dodged easily and stood in a circle around him, their eyes bright with fun, their mouths making in unison the cruelly lacerating sound of the nasal ‘a.’ Just so, he knew, in other circles had their fathers stood, and their grandfathers, tormenting some other pariah, some other odd one; just so would their own sons stand.
Doctor Johnny
Is a rummy.
Again he started to lunge, hunching his thin shoulders, but then stood suddenly still, looking at first one and then another, at Fred who rode to school each day on a horse with a fifty-dollar saddle, at Dick the bartender’s son who wrote on the walls in the toilet and bored a hole so he could peek at the girls, whose marks in class were very nearly as good as Peter’s ow
n; at sly Larry who already weighed nearly two hundred pounds and grinned often without speaking much. And watching, Peter knew with a knowledge as tempered as a sly old man’s that he must oppose them on his own terms, not theirs. And he knew it was not only they for whom he harbored this novel, cold, impersonal hatred, but for all those normal, rich, envied and secure ones who might dare insult his private image of the Gordons.
That image began to take concrete shape when he started a scrapbook of photographs, drawings and advertisements cut from old magazines few in that country had ever heard of — Town and Country, International Studio, Mentor, Century — all passed on to the school by an unusual woman up the valley, piling up unread over the years in the dark of the cloakroom alongside cartons of unclaimed overshoes and forsaken mittens. The schoolteacher, a kind, phlegmatic lady who thought often of childhood and of a kitten she’d had and loved, saw no reason why they should not be cut up; they had little to do with anything she or her other pupils might find valuable. What characterized the drawings Peter chose and clipped and pasted in with his pale hands was luxury and affluence — scenes of the sailing of ocean liners, the departure of a crack railroad train, collections of jewels, English country houses, heavy draperies, leather luggage, the beach at Newport and the automobiles that brought the fashionable bathers there — Locomobiles, Isotta-Fraschinis, Minervas. But luxury and affluence were not all that characterized his choices: each drawing, photograph or advertisement contained human figures that reminded him of his father or his mother, his mother standing on a terrace gazing across a sculptured lawn, his father checking in at a great hotel. Thus he began a book of dreams raised up against his family’s failure and the everlasting whimper of the wind, a blueprint of the world to come. He would bring this world about by becoming a great surgeon, reading a paper before learned men in France, standing aside while strangers spoke of his mother’s beauty and his father’s kindness.
The Power of the Dog Page 3