by Leslie Glass
Clara shook her head and erased the message. The next one was Harold again, more urgent this time.
“Clara, darling.” Pause. “True love, great love, can always be renewed no matter how long the break. It can be refreshed, nourished, made to bloom again. You know no man has ever been for you what I am. Maybe you thought you could love another man, but you can’t, not after me.” His voice was the teacher’s voice, persuasive, urgent.
“Our love was the model that could never be duplicated. All the others are failures. Only our love and what we accomplished together have endured, Clara. The older and wiser I become, the more I understand how deep and persistent our connection is. Darling, my heart is full of you. I have the answer. Hurry! Hurry.”
For a moment Clara was puzzled, then she punched the button and listened to the message again. Between the first and the second time he had called, Harold had lost his anchor to reality and spun out into space. All semblance of normalcy had vanished. Here was the proof she’d needed. The last two incidents were truly disorganizing acts, probably as disorganizing for Harold as a second or third murder would be to a serial killer. He was hanging himself. With some satisfaction, she pushed the button to hear the next message.
“Clara, our love is still here, whole and unsullied, as we used to talk of it. Remember? How the passionate merger of man and woman puts them in touch with all the beauty and nobility of the world? The history of art, the paintings, the statues, the poetry? Both partners flooded, in touch with it all. A transcending experience that can never, ever be erased. The merger of body and soul is always there, and the feelings can be recovered at any time. In a glance, in a touch, in a kiss. Only mistrust, only suspicion can destroy it. Clara, I’m waiting for you. I have the answer,”
Clara closed her eyes as the fourth message played. “I have been waiting for you all weekend! Carmen, you filthy slut. You accused the wrong man. I spent my whole weekend working for you, and you’re not here … you selfish bitch … The guilty man is that nurse we had all the trouble with last year, that Boudreau. You’ve gone over the line with this, Clara. I warn you, I’m not putting up with it any longer.”
Boudreau … Hal was blaming Boudreau, that crazy nurse who’d overdosed a patient last year? Clara sat on the edge of her bed, trying to think. Could she have been wrong about this all along? Could she possibly have made a fatal mistake? She punched out Arch’s number, first in Sarasota, then in Washington. He wasn’t in either place. Then she went into the bathroom and threw up the sandwich she’d eaten on the plane, peered at herself in the mirror, shaking her head at the attractive, dark-haired woman she saw reflected there. She’d come so far from the ugly duckling she’d been. Poor, fatherless, without any resources beyond her own intelligence and will. Tears stung her eyes.
“Why? Why me?” she asked her reflection plaintively. “What have I done to deserve this?” She suddenly felt old, vulnerable. She should be the reigning queen now, a woman in her prime, not a victim plagued by an elderly, obsessed former lover. The irony was more bitter still, since it was Harold all those years ago who had refused to marry her. She had wanted him even though he was almost fifteen years older than she and not by any means the most powerful man in their world. But Harold hadn’t wanted to divorce his wife after so many years. He refused to bear the stigma of disloyalty.
He was the one who told her “all things must end” when she finished her residency and wanted to stay on at the Centre. He even set up a new post for her far away and sent her off. They hadn’t agreed to end it. He hadn’t wanted the scandal of a permanent relationship, so he had ended it. Clara had been analyzed for many years while she was in training. She knew that her father’s abandonment of her and her mother had made it hard for her to trust any man. But it was her experience with Harold that had shaped all her other relationships with men. Clara’s defeat with Harold had never been analyzed. Harold had taken advantage of his position and used her. And now he was muddying the waters, confusing the truth, again.
Clara decided if she’d made a mistake and accused the wrong man, she could not blame herself. It would be a perfectly reasonable error, stemming directly from Hal’s betrayal of her trust years ago, and his attempt to carry that treachery forward into the present as if she were still a defenseless resident, his adoring pupil. It was intolerable. Without changing from the khaki trousers and cashmere jacket she’d traveled home in, Clara tucked a clean handkerchief in her breast pocket, picked up her purse, and went to meet Harold in his office.
She heard his voice the moment she got off the elevator.
“I told you. I told you. You’re supposed to listen to me, and you didn’t listen. Why didn’t you listen to me? We could have avoided all these … people descending on us.”
Clara stopped to listen. Her footsteps clacking on the stone floor suddenly went silent.
“They’re going to know, and I’m not going to keep it a secret. You think this is a secret. Well, this is no secret. They know. They know all about us.”
Harold’s voice was both conspiratorial and threatening, but he was making no effort to keep it down. That was significant because people were careful there, even on Sundays. No one liked his paranoia to show. Clara approached like a hunter now, silent and wary.
The doctors’ academic offices were lined up, one after another, on the nineteenth floor. Up here there were no waiting rooms or secretarial areas. Just doors that opened into identical, unremarkable rooms all dominated by large institutional radiators that always seemed to work in opposition to the season. Today it was chilly in the building, but there was no sound of any of them clanking now. All the other doors on the hall were closed. For a second it was quiet. Clara picked up her pace.
“Clara, show yourself! I know you’re there.”
She pushed open the door.
“Aaahh.” Harold gave a little cry and lunged behind his desk. “Clara!”
“Hi,” she said softly, halting in the doorway. “What’s up?”
He raised his hands to protect his body, cowered behind his desk, gaping at her with wild eyes. “What are you doing here?” he cried.
“You called, Harold. What’s going on?”
She took in the room without turning her head. Harold was alone, surrounded by dozens of files. The files were scattered all over the desk and piled on the floor. His laptop computer was in the middle of his desk, half covered by files. The computer screen was blank, but the printer light was on.
“That’s right, I did. Clara,” he said sternly, suddenly moving out from behind his desk. His hand came up, finger pointed at her in a characteristic lecturing gesture. “The file has disappeared, but the answer is in here.” He pointed at the computer.
“In here,” he continued. “I told you not to ignore this, and you didn’t listen to me. Now they’re going to come down … on us.” He put his finger to his lips, looking toward the door fearfully. “They’re going to …” He came out from behind his desk, picking a path through the papers on the floor.
“Who?” Clara asked calmly.
Harold’s head jerked toward the door. “Were you followed?” he demanded shrilly.
“What?”
“Did someone follow you?”
She didn’t think so. Not today. “Why would someone follow me?” she asked.
“Did someone follow you here? Answer me. I’m asking a question.”
“No.” Coolly, she watched Harold slowly hang himself.
He was dressed as usual. He wore gray flannel slacks. His sports jacket hung on the back of his swivel chair. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and the collar of his blue dress shirt was open, the sleeves unevenly rolled on his arms. But his white fringe of hair stuck straight up and his eyes were wild.
Clara’s eyes moved back to his desk. On the wooden extension pulled out halfway sat a quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label with a nearly empty glass beside it. The top was off the bottle and only about half an inch of the rich golden-brown liquid remai
ned. Harold must have been drinking all afternoon.
“Oh, God!” He started screaming. He stared at the wall, shuddering and gasping. “Ahhhhhh. Oh, God. Ahhhhhh. Bugs. Ooooh. Bugs … eeeeee. Running up and down the wall … Eeeeee. Clara!!!! You brought bugs in here,” he cried. “You brought the bugs.”
“What bugs?” She twisted around to look at the wall where he pointed. There were the usual diplomas, awards, museum poster. Harold lurched toward her accusingly.
Clara held out her hand to stop him. “There aren’t any bugs in here, Hal,” she said evenly. “No recording devices. No crawlies. No FBI, no CIA coming after us. It’s just us kids. Calm down, Hal. We’re going to be just fine.”
He stopped, stood still, and for a moment struggled to haul himself back into lucidity. “I’m … sorry, Clara … I don’t know what’s the matter with me.” He shook his head, as if to push the crawlies out. “It must … be the summer heat.”
“Hal, it’s November. It’s cool.”
“That’s right. August. Don’t worry. I’m all right now.” He raised his teaching finger, trembling all over, swaying on his feet. His face flushed cherry red.
“Hal—?”
The red in Harold’s face darkened to purple. His body hurled backward, hitting the corner of his desk, knocking over a pile of files, and sending their contents in all directions as he fell heavily by the feet of his analyst’s couch. He landed on his side, hitting his head with a sickening thud.
“Oh!” Surprised, Clara lunged toward him just as his back arched unnaturally and his legs started kicking out at the scattered papers. As he began writhing on the floor, she scrambled for the phone on his desk.
“This is Dr. Treadwell in 1917. I have an MI. Call the code. Nineteenth floor, room 17. Call the code!” she screamed. Then she slammed down the receiver and sank to her knees.
Hal’s sphincters had let go, releasing the contents of his bowel and bladder. Foul foam-flecked vomit trickled everywhere. On the rug, on the papers, on her pants.
“Life is wet,” Hal always used to say, laughing at how surprised, year after year, his students were to find out how messy every aspect of human existence was. “Love is wet. Life is wet. Death is, too.”
“Oh, God, Hal.” She began to work on him. He was still now, cyanotic.
She rolled him onto his back, opening his mouth and sticking her fingers in it to clear away the vomit and mucus. He was apneic, had stopped breathing. She struck his chest with both fists together, wiped his face and mouth with the handkerchief she’d snatched from her jacket pocket.
“Come on, get going.” It was all automatic. She struck him again, then put her mouth to his. Struck him again and again, breathed into his foul mouth.
Two pants to fill his lungs and one strike to the chest. She didn’t hear people running down the hall, rolling the gurney. Breathe. Breathe. Strike.
Guards tumbled into the room, trampling the files.
“Oh, shit, it’s Dr. Dickey.”
“Heart attack?”
Breathe. Breathe. Strike. Clara didn’t answer. She made a motion with her hand and one of the guards took over the chest massage as the other brought the gurney as far into the room as it would go. Together they lifted him, continued to administer CPR.
Within seconds, the gurney was out in the hall and three paramedics from the main hospital building down the street ran toward them, pushing the crash cart from the closet on the end of the floor. Wordlessly, a young man with a ponytail found a vein in Harold’s wrist and shoved the IV needle into him, so he could start a drip. Another opened Harold’s mouth and inserted a short oral airway attached to a breathing bag.
The third set the defibrillator machine. He looked to Clara. “Juice him?”
Clara nodded.
He ripped open Harold’s shirt, squirting contact jelly on the two steel paddles. He placed them under Harold’s left arm and on his chest, looked to Clara again. Again she nodded.
“Get back, everyone,” the paramedic said, and hit the buttons on the paddles.
Harold’s arms shot up, fell down, and suddenly they were all running to the elevator as his chest heaved.
“Here, I got it. Move aside, please.”
Silently they piled in. Gurney, guards, paramedics, Clara.
“Jesus. Who’s that?” a white-suited aide said.
“Oh, my God. It’s Dr. Dickey.” A fat nurse cradling her take-out coffee and doughnuts started to cry, dribbling coffee down her pink angora sweater. “Oh, no, is he dead?”
“Shut up.”
“Who said that? Who told me to shut up?”
The paramedic with a ponytail and two earrings that Clara hadn’t noticed before shot the sobbing nurse a furious look, then went on with his work.
“Shit, don’t stop,” Clara cried as the doors slid open on the wrong floor.
“Sorry, Doctor.”
The doors closed on the appalling stink. Everyone was panting, sweating. Someone swore softly. The patient wasn’t responding. They couldn’t shock him with the paddles again in this tiny, crowded space with no electricity. Clara’s head pounded.
Finally they were at the front doors, rolling down a ramp out on the street. Then they were running with the gurney and the IV dripping an anti-arrhythmia drug, the breathing bag pumped by a paramedic. It was a block and a half to the emergency room. Traffic clogged the street around the ER entrance. None of it was going well. Everyone knew it. Harold wasn’t coming around. They were silent, running, gasping.
Suddenly a car careened through the changing light at the corner and the gurney tipped off the curb as they frantically tried to stop it from rolling onto the street into the oncoming car.
“Oh, Christ, hang on.”
Two paramedics held the patient as two pedestrians ran up to help the third right the gurney and get it going again. “Oh, man. Did you see that? Guy just kept going.”
Through ER, they moved into a back treatment room and continued working. Clara silently watched procedures she’d seen a hundred times. The airway removed, Hal’s mouth opened again, illuminated by a laryngoscope, a clear plastic tube was slid down into his trachea, then attached to a black ambu bag so that oxygen could be pumped into his lungs. Six, seven people were working on him now. He was hooked up to a respirator, an electrocardiogram. Adrenalin was shot directly into his heart. Clara stood back as they worked for the full required hour, trying desperately to resuscitate a man she knew had been dead almost from the moment he hit the floor.
Hal’s internist finally strode in. He’d been called from a tennis game and was wearing a black warm-up suit. He was tall and young and fit, and seemed surprised to be there.
“Jesus, smells like someone’s been hitting the bottle pretty bad,” he said, even before he looked at the flat line on the EKG or picked up the chart.
“Yeah, the patient.”
Dr. Chatman turned to Clara. “You’re Dr. Treadwell?”
“Yes.” She put out her hand and he shook it.
“Ivan Chatman. You were with him?”
She nodded.
“What happened?”
“He was in his office, pretty upset, I guess. He’d been drinking. He called me at home. I came over to check on him and almost the moment I arrived, he keeled over.”
The young internist frowned. “I checked him out only a few weeks ago. He was in excellent condition—”
“A man over sixty, you never know,” Clara said.
“I was fond of him.” The internist shook his head and pronounced Harold Dickey dead. The machines were turned off.
The ER cardiologist turned to Dr. Chatman. “Ivan, we’d like permission to do an autopsy.”
Chatman nodded. “Sure, I’ll call his wife. I don’t think it’ll be a problem. She’s a former nurse.”
The oxygen mask was off the dead man’s face now. The EKG and other machines were unhooked. The IV bag was detached, but the needle was still stuck in his hand with some tubing hanging from it. They
had left it in him because they wouldn’t be using it again. He was blue, his hands already slightly clawed. All the efforts to save him made him look as if he had been beaten to death.
“Problem?” The cardiologist watched Chatman.
Chatman moved to stand by the dead man’s head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “This doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Clara said.
“I knew him pretty well. He didn’t take narcotics or any medication that I know of. He was fit as a horse.… ” He frowned, then turned away from the body. “Oh, well.”
“You want to run the toxes?” the ER cardiologist asked. “You never know. If there’s a question later, I don’t want any problems on this end.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll speak to his wife. If she gives the okay, then go for it,” Chatman said.
“Any ideas what we might be looking for?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Clara muttered again. “The man had a heart attack. This is absurd.”
Chatman looked at the cardiologist, then shook his head. “I can’t imagine him taking anything.” He reached out and pulled a sheet over the dead man’s face.
Clara stalked out. They were going to run toxes on Hal. She didn’t want to hear Chatman’s side of the conversation with Sally Ann, Harold’s wax-museum figure of a wife. Or anything else, for that matter. Suddenly she was uneasy, deeply uneasy. Her mouth was dry and had a sour taste. Her whole body ached, smelled of sweat, vomit, and Hal’s Johnnie Walker.
She remembered Hal’s door had been left open. She had to go back to the Centre and secure his office. She didn’t want to go through the front doors and answer a lot of questions. She thought about the questions and how she would answer them. Her head was down; her eyes were on her feet. She felt numb, queasy, didn’t want to go back to the Centre. Had to. When she lifted her head, she was horrified to see the man Harold had mentioned in his message. Bobbie Boudreau was leaning against a tree across the street, smoking a cigarette, looking the other way. Clara had seen him many times on the locked ward, where he had been a nurse. She recognized him immediately.