by Jim Grimsley
As she listened to his answer, he studied her comforting body, its thick waist and generous curves lounging in the black leather chair. He told her about breaking up with his current girlfriend, and he told about breaking up with the previous girlfriends. Each time he described one of the girlfriends, he got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, and finally he said, "But that's not what I want to talk about."
"I didn't think it was," Shaun said.
"I want to tell you about Allen," Ford said. "And then I want to tell you about McKenzie."
He expected to tell the story with detachment, but failed. He stopped talking and waited, shivering. Shaun had listened with occasional changes of expression, small nods, and careful encouragements for him to continue. He told about Hammond and McKenzie, and those months in Chapel Hill when he had been with them both. He trembled, but Shaun sat calmly, hands folded in her lap. When he said, "But he never came back to get the dog, and so I kept him," and then fell silent, Shaun sat motionless. Finally nodding once.
"Why did you tell me that?" she asked.
"To tell you something about me."
"What are you telling me?"
"That I must have cared about him a lot."
"That you must have?"
He thought carefully. "That I did. I cared about him. More than I cared about anybody else that I can think of."
Ford visited Shaun once a week for a period of several months. While he declined to discuss these sessions with his parents, they were relieved to note he had regained his weight and color. He slept well, after the first few weeks. Returning to the empty house no longer paralyzed him. Abandoning the image of himself floating above himself, he caressed the physical objects around him, the exquisite antiques that had belonged to his Great-grandmother Bondurant, the Waterford vase full of silk daisies, the stainless frame of the Matisse print over the Victorian sofa.
At the hospital, he proved himself to be a better prospect as a pediatrician than many would have guessed, moving with authority from nursing unit to clinic exam room, charismatic, with a knack for getting along with nurses and ancillary staff. Even after thirty-six and forty-eight-hour shifts, Ford remained even-tempered and clearheaded, proving his value repeatedly.
"Why do you want to be a doctor?" Shaun asked, in late September.
"I don't know," Ford answered, "I never really thought about it."
"You're working very hard to become something, and you don't know why you want to be that something?"
Ford enjoyed the game of framing his answers in words that Shaun would allow. "I want to be a doctor because my father was a doctor and my grandfather was a doctor. I never really thought about my own reasons. It was enough to think about my father and my grandfather."
"Don't you think you should do a little thinking about what you want?"
"I guess I already have. Because I'm going into pediatrics. My father wasn't too happy about that because pediatricians don't have the same prestige that surgeons do. Don't make as much money. So he wasn't very happy with that, on top of the whole business with Hammond."
"Do you think there's any connection between the two things?"
"You mean, the fact that I'm going to keep disappointing my father for a good while to come?"
Shaun fingered the plain gold band that she wore on her right hand. "That's one way to look at it. But I think it might be healthier just to think of it as one more step toward honesty with your parents. With both of them. Your mother is involved in all this, too."
Honesty. With the white house, the cool rooms, the yard filled with oleander, the Vietnamese gardener moving among the blossoms. Honesty with the cool china, the polished silver, the framed pictures of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, collateral couples, the great paired beings of his past. "I know what you're trying to say, Shaun. But it doesn't matter what I call it, honesty or anything else. My dad's going to hate it. So will my mom. In my family, in Savannah, you get married. You just do it. No matter what. I'm already late."
By early fall, his parents' concern over his matrimonial future became acute. At dinner with his father one evening, the two of them supping in the elegant affiliated men's business club (which remained a men's club even though women occasionally won membership), Dr. McKinney Sr. brought up Ford's old girlfriend, Haviland Barrows, who had recently married Red Fisher, one of Ford's high school acquaintances. "Settled right down in the historic district in a little stoop cottage. Renovated beautifully, right out of a textbook. I don't think that's such a bad way to start out." Father dabbed his lips with the napkin, preparing to engage his almond torte. "Of course, he’ll get the Jones Street house when his grandfather dies. Your uncle Hubert drew up that will. God knows what she gets. Some of the Barrows don't have a cent, from what I hear."
"I hope she's happy," Ford said, signaling the waiter to bring more coffee. "She deserves it."
"I never did understand how you let her get away, son," Father said.
"It was easy," Ford answered. "In fact, I wonder if I'm likely to get married at all."
"What are you talking about? Of course you'll marry. Your mother and I wonder why it's taken you this long."
"If it's taken this long," Ford said, "that has to be because I've wanted it that way."
"Nonsense. First you had to get through medical school. That's what we've always expected." Dr. McKinney adjusted his collar. Ford spooned his own torte. "But now you're out of medical school, and it's time to think about your future. You're going to be a busy man, and you need someone to take care of you at home."
"You got married when you were in medical school."
"That was different. When your mother and I were coming up, people got married when they were younger. These days it's better to wait, the way you have. But you do have to stop waiting sometime." His father laughed, self-consciously, underlining the jovial atmosphere he attempted to create for serious discussions.
"I don't think I'm waiting." Ford spoke with all the finality he could muster. "I've had plenty of chances. I don't think I want to get married."
"You can't possibly be serious."
"I can." Folding his napkin and laying it on the corner of the table.
His father paused, then changed the subject to the politics of Emory University Medical School, the appointment of yet another dean. "This one may be worse than the last one," Father said. "We don't know if this one can even function with a—" falling suddenly silent.
"You don't know if he can what?" Ford asked.
"Well, anyway, he can't be worse the last one."
"But what about Dean Rouse?" Ford asked. "What are your buddies at the club saying about him?"
"Just idle talk," Father said uncomfortably.
"Did you know he's a bachelor?" Ford asked, after a moment.
"Why, yes. I did hear that." But his face was set as stone, and Ford watched him carefully. Frost settled over the table, covering their dinnerware and the remains of the dessert. Ford sipped his coffee.
Later they discussed his trust funds and other financial matters. Ford asked after his mother. Father answered that she was well. The conversation cooled even further, and the two men parted company in the porte cochere as the liveried driver handed Father the keys to his vintage Mercedes. At the last moment, the elder doctor said to the younger, "Don't forget we talked, Ford. You need to think about what you're doing. You've come through a bad time, and I think all that trouble started because you need somebody to take care of you. You need a wife."
"I'm thinking about all that, Father."
The two shook hands, and in his father's eyes glimmered ghost lights of real affection, sodden and held back.
At about the same time, while awaiting an appointment with his chief of service, Dr. Milliken, Ford chanced to read a memorandum posted in the Department of Pediatrics office suite. The memorandum, like others layered on top of it on the bulletin board, might have merited little of Ford's attention, being unremarkable—but it was sign
ed by someone in administration named Dan Crell. The signature itched at Ford for a few moments before he remembered the Christmas concert, the eerie voice, and the name on the concert program.
At the end of September, Ford rotated out of Grady for two months of training at Egleston, another of the teaching hospitals that Emory staffed. By the time he returned to Grady, in December, with the hospital adorned in poinsettias and decorated doors, he had allowed the name to lapse from active memory once again. But one morning early in the month, he became aware of someone watching him from the back of a nearly empty elevator.
Since he was ultimately headed for the operating room, Ford wore the green surgical scrubs that are ubiquitous in hospitals; the particular suit Ford had scrounged fit him snugly, the shoulders somewhat narrower than his own. The short sleeves rode high on his shoulders, and apparently the young man at the back of the elevator found the sight of Ford's shoulders irresistible. Nothing new. Ford turned a little and allowed himself to return the man's gaze coolly.
But the face shocked him. Recognition came at once. Ford looked for the man's identification badge and saw it hanging from the pocket of his shirt. Mr. Crell noted the motion, and this discomfited Ford somewhat. He felt suddenly naked in the green scrubs. But he met the man's gaze again.
This time Mr. Crell averted his eyes, as if shy. The moment gave Ford an interval in which to study the face again.
Dark curls framed features that seemed sharp and soft at once. The face broadcast innocence, as if a child were entombed in it. The face as a whole shimmered from awkwardness to moments of grace. Or seemed to, until the young man met Ford's gaze again.
"This is our floor," said Crell's companion, a nurse whom Ford had failed to notice.
"I guess I'm falling asleep," Crell said, "it's all those late nights," easing away from the elevator door. Even in those few words Ford could hear the singer in Dan's voice, the rich soothing undertone that, for a moment, filled the elevator car. That was it, or so Ford thought. But as the elevator doors began to close, the man looked back at Ford. They simply watched each other, and the door closed, and that was that.
December of that year brought more sick people to Grady than any previous December of record, with patients in every available bed and new admissions sometimes waiting for hours in the emergency clinics. Every morning, the faculty and staff of the various medical disciplines met to determine which patients, while not fully recovered, might be well enough to go home anyway, in order to make another bed available for someone even sicker. During the height of this crisis, a school bus turned over while rounding a curve on Johnson Ferry Road, and suddenly the Pediatric Emergency Clinic filled with injured children.
The hospital implemented its disaster plan, called in extra staff, and coordinated the distribution of the injured to other area hospitals. Ford saw the first of the injuries following the interruption of morning rounds, when word of the bus accident rippled through the nursing units. Dr. Milliken chose Ford for part of the team that was to assist the trauma surgeons. He helped the emergency medical technicians unload the first child and rushed the broken body into the makeshift trauma room. Skull crushed on one side, delicate, throbbing brain tissue naked to the air, a little girl already intubated and strung with intravenous lines. Ford heard himself asking crisp questions about what had already been done for the girl, his voice nearly disembodied, almost as if he floated above himself once again, detached as he had been when Hammond died.
That moment of disembodiment—seeing the child with her head opened like a blossoming flower—was the last he allowed himself for hours. He assisted with six of the twelve children, all pitifully bruised, cut, blood oozing onto starched sheets and dripping off the side-rails of stretchers. His mind felt white and clean in the midst of all this motion, his orders crisp. Once he corrected a third-year resident on the proper dosage of painkiller for a nine-year-old with a body weight of eighty-seven pounds; once he started an intravenous line on a child when even the nurses could not find a vein. He felt himself elevated by all that motion into a state of grace, and while in it he moved through medicine as a dancer through music.
Inevitable problems occurred. The emergency clinics ran out of stretchers, and hospital administrators ordered a search of every floor of the massive building, sending unit managers to herd stretchers to the ambulance ramp. The telephone computer glitched, half the clinic phones went dead, and for the ten or fifteen minutes needed to restore service in the area, chaos reigned. At about this point, when a little girl with massive bruises had waited two hours for a bed, Dr. Milliken sent Ford to find a phone and get some word about beds.
He found the few working telephones in the clinic area already occupied by administrators calling to complain about the tardiness of telephone repair. However, a few days before, Ford had learned that the Admitting Office lay just around the corner from the emergency clinics, and since he wanted to get away from the clinic scene for a moment, he said to Dr. Milliken, "I can't find a phone working. I'm going around to the Admitting Office."
He passed through a crowded waiting room and stopped at the first desk he saw, at which a young woman was busily filling in a form as she conducted a telephone interview with a patient's next-of-kin. Ford hovered in her doorway for some moments, but she ignored him. Ford searched other offices and found nearly everyone occupied in similar work. But one of the desks, tucked into a small room at the back of the office suite, belonged to someone called an admitting officer, and because this title sounded promising, Ford waited in the doorway till the woman finished her phone call.
"Hi, what can I do for you?" she asked after hanging up the phone, patting her hair.
"I need a pediatric bed for Connors. You have the paperwork. The phones are out across the hall, and I walked over to see what was happening."
"No beds," waving her hands, "I got beds empty, but the nurses tell me they're not clean and the housekeepers tell me they have crews coming up to clean them. But when I talk to the nurses they tell me the. crews never get there and the beds are still dirty."
Ford paused briefly to rearrange the information in his head, answering, "We've got a lot of kids needing those beds. Don't you think somebody can do something about getting them clean?"
"Doc, I've already called three times."
"Well, call again."
The woman sighed, patted her hair again, reached for the phone and dialed. "This is Rollins, get me James. Yeah, I got another problem." On hold, the woman tapped on a pad of Post-it notes from a pharmaceutical company. "James. Hey, honey. Yeah, you knew I'd be calling you again, didn't you? Listen. Did you get those Peds beds cleaned yet? 9A and 9C, right. Honey, we don't care about adolescent beds right now, we're putting everybody up there we can fit." Pause. "Well, the nurses tell me nobody's cleaning." Pause. "Honey, I know you need more people, so do I, but we got to get beds clean from someplace and you're the only one I know." Pause. "The doctor's standing right here. Little girl been waiting two hours to get a bed. That's right, from the bus accident." Pause. "Well, James, girl, you better get after somebody. The nurses tell me nobody's cleaning anything on the ninth floor, and we have to do something about that. You call me. All right? You call somebody, and then you call me and let me know what's going on." Cradling the receiver, she looked at Ford and shrugged. "I'm working on it, doc. What else can I tell you? Call administration, maybe they can do something."
She gave him a phone number to call, Mr. Franken's assistant, she said, because Mr. Franken was in charge of admissions. Ford went into another office, asked to use the phone and dialed.
A voice said, "Administration, Mr. Crell." Soothing, even through the telephone cord.
"This is Dr. McKinney in Pediatrics," Ford said. "I have a problem, and I think you can help me with it."
A moment's silence. Dan said, "I'll be happy to do whatever I can."
"I'm in your Admitting Office and I can't find out why we're having to wait hours in an emergency situati
on to get beds cleaned for the kids we're holding in the emergency room."
"How long have you been waiting?"
"I've got a little girl who's needed a bed for two hours."
"What did the Admitting Office tell you?"
"That there are empty beds on the ninth floor but they can't find the housekeeping crew to clean them."
"Well, it sounds like somebody ought to go to the ninth floor and find out whether anybody is cleaning beds," Dan said, "so why don't I do that? Then where can I call you?"
"You can't," Ford said, "the phones aren't working down here. I had to come to Admitting and grab a phone to call you."
"Well then, I'll come down there."
Returning to the Surgical Emergency Clinic, Ford passed Dr. Milliken and said, "I couldn't get an answer from the admitting officer, so I called Mr. Franken's office and spoke to Dan Crell. He says he'll find out what's going on with the beds and let us know as soon as he can."
Dr. Milliken's brows rose slightly. "Good work," he said, mildly surprised. "I was planning to speak to Franken myself."
Word that ninth-floor beds had been cleaned and assigned came to them from Mr. Franken himself, however, with Ms. Rollins, the admitting officer, in train, and no Dan Crell in sight. In the press of events Ford felt no disappointment. He shook hands with the associate administrator at Dr. Milliken’s behest, then busied himself with the transport teams who would escort the injured children to the nursing units.
Only later, in the first moment of stillness, a vague disappointment overlay the other fragments whirling in his brain. The guy might have found a reason to come in person, if he wanted. Not that it mattered to Ford. But he went on sitting at the tiny desk shoved against the corridor wall, unable to complete the order he had begun to write. He let himself drift, listening to the myriad voices, aware of motion but detached from it. Remembering the day in the elevator, the way the man had admired him. Remembering the easy voice on the telephone today,Well, then, I'll come down there. He had thought Dan Crell might be attracted to him. That hardly seemed such an odd thought, since so many people were.