by Belva Plain
Jessie picked up the photographs and shuffled through them. “You can keep these or destroy them,” she said, laying them back on the table. “Whatever you want. I don’t care which.”
“Not return them?”
Jessie shook her head. “They’d be a time bomb in that family. They’d wreck it.”
“You care if they do?”
“There are children! How can one wish that on children? It was enough when you—” She stopped. “And besides, that woman—that Hazel—never did anything to me.”
Ah yes, poor Hazel! Why did one think of her as “poor” when she was, after all, so snug and well off in her home? But there was something—She was so mad about Martin, it was embarrassing sometimes.
Jessie leaned over a photograph. She spoke reflectively, almost to herself. “Of course, I always knew he was an uncommon man. I always saw how far he’d go if he were given half a chance.”
“He talks about you sometimes. I think he might even like to see you. Why don’t you? People who’ve been divorced can still be civil to each other, can’t they?”
“A while ago you never wanted to see your father again. Now you want me to see him.”
The mind is so confused. You are old enough to understand how young you are and how contradictory everything is: other people, one’s feelings about oneself, everything. How long will it be before you ever get it all straightened out? Will you, ever?
And, almost angrily, Claire cried, “I don’t want anything! I only asked why—”
“All right, I’ll tell you why. I’m peaceful the way things are, the way I am. I don’t need to complicate my life with him or with my sister or anyone. I’ve nothing to say to him. I’ve made my way with no thanks to anyone except myself. Listen, I don’t want to hurt anybody, Claire; I only want to be let alone. I’m a realist. I’ve had to be.”
Jessie’s face, in the shaft of lamplight, was coppery gold. It burned. Intelligence was in it, and strength, and pain. Suddenly, through the opacity that separates one human spirit from the other, there came to Claire a flaring white translucence, an opening up, so that for an instant she entered into Jessie, lived as Jessie, was there in that other instant of shudder and shock when the young girl first truly saw herself and knew she had been condemned when she was born.
Jessie got up. “I’m weary.” She stroked her daughter’s hair back from her forehead. “Come to bed. You’ve had a hard day. You’ve done a deal of growing up today.”
Alone in her room Claire stood brushing her hair. The rain had begun again, threatening the windowpane. Suddenly it came to her, so suddenly that she stopped the brush in midstroke, that she pitied, not Jessie only but her father, too. He—in all his competence and strength, he who was able to solve everything—she pitied him! And in this pity there was something new, another kind of love … Wasn’t that strange?
And now she felt the tightening of things and people. It was a feeling new to her, who had been particularly free in doing and thinking whatever she wanted. Those two, she thought, my father and the woman, Mary Fern—what sort of woman can she be, she with the dreaming eyes beneath a shady summer hat, with the long fingers lying on the silk lap? Those two have changed so many other lives besides their own! Because of them my mother and I live alone in this house; because of them there are Hazel, little Enoch and the babies—
What may come to me yet, to all of us, bound as we are to one another?
Chapter 24
The day the office had opened, indeed the day on which the lease was signed, Martin had been terrified lest he had undertaken too much and wouldn’t be able to afford it. He was still, and probably always would be, a cautious heir to the Depression. But he need not have worried.
Very quickly the appointment book began to fill. Friends from the old bicycle and handball days had returned from the war and were sending referrals. More referrals came from new contacts in general practice and the specialties; his reputation was wider than he had known. So it became clear that, for the first time in his life, he would not only not be short of money, but would have it to spare, would have that freedom from constraint which comes when all one’s bills can be paid without wrinkling the forehead over them.
He came to his desk one afternoon while the office was still empty.
“You’re early,” the secretary said. He always thought of her as the “little” secretary, although she was over forty and had a perfectly good name: Jenny Jennings. “There’s no one booked till one-thirty.”
“I know. I finished at the hospital.” And he closed his door.
The truth was that he hadn’t finished at the hospital in any way he would have wanted to finish. The patient had died. Thrusting aside the sandwich and coffee on the desk, he went over, for the third or fourth time in the last hour, the agony of the morning.
Even before the hemorrhage started, he had known. Disaster had a certain feel and smell. He had known its warning breath often enough, and would know it again. That was in the very nature of the hard and sorrowful work he had chosen. Sometimes you were given an extra bit of last minute luck to pull you out of a tight place, but not very often, and not today. From the evil growth attached to the carotid artery, the bright blood had just come gushing; Bearing down on the gauze packing, it had taken his whole strength in an attempt to stop the flow, but it had kept coming. And he had wished he were somewhere else, anywhere but there and then.
A circle of heads had surrounded him. He’d been aware of faces watching the open skull, watching him to see what he was going to do. But there had been nothing to do and they had all known it.
“The EKG is flat,” Perry had finally said at Martin’s shoulder. The words were mournful, final, like the sound of the sea in a shell. “There’s no heartbeat,” he’d said.
“Oxygen,” Martin responded, but it had already been brought. The tube was in the nostrils and someone was pressing on the chest of this young man who had been, so he had told Martin with pride, a varsity basketball player. Now he worked in a bank, and his wife had had twins last winter.
Martin had drawn off his gloves and slapped them furiously to the floor. Leonard Max, who was chief resident now, picked them up without a word. Then they both went to the locker room, where they put on lab coats to hide the tragic blood on their hospital gowns, removed the operating shoes and went down the hall to the waiting room to tell the family that the basketball player, the son, the husband, the father of the twins, was dead.
Later he had talked to Perry, protesting. “It need never have been if I’d got to him a year ago.”
“I know,” Perry said softly. Always he had been a foil when Martin was in trouble, offering some cheerful comment or remark to offset a stillness in Martin, offering as now his listening silence when events exploded.
“Idiots!” Martin cried. “Treating him for a neurosis when he complained of headache! Pressure of the job, the responsibility of twins, they said. My God, it’s shameful … Talk of the unity of the neurological specialties!”
He remembered now the young man’s courage and confidence, assumed, very likely, for who would not be terrified to know that an evil something was swelling and tightening in his brain? But he had been quietly brave, reassuring his wife, shaking Martin’s hand, making a lame joke or two.
Ah, you saw so much death sometimes in this work, you wished you had become a dermatologist, or better yet, a math teacher, a car salesman, anything but what you were! Some deaths touched you with a knife-edge of anguish, just as some of the war-wounded still stayed visibly in mind, while others had faded, not because any were more worthy than the others, but because—well, they just did. And he remembered now the boy he would always think of as Chicago and how he hadn’t been as concerned about dying as he had been about losing that one finger.
Pa, Martin thought Pa had that terrible concern, so personal sometimes as to be almost unprofessional. He had tried to conceal it, but one always knew by the way he clenched his teeth on the pipe stem,
so that his words came out all muffled. His mother would tell the children not to annoy their father that night because a bad thing had happened: a patient had died. And her eyes would be so troubled! Soft people, they had been.
Sometimes he could still feel flashes, for just a second or two, of the grief he’d felt when his father had died. And he was reminded of the day he’d met Leonard Max. It had been the young man’s first day on the job. Martin had asked him something or told him to do something, and when Max hadn’t responded at once, he had been impatient and spoken sharply. Afterward someone had told Martin that the boy had just got news that morning of his father’s death. He was finishing the morning’s work before taking the train home. And Martin, remembering his own father, had been so sorry and ashamed, more sorry than he could say. He had apologized to Max.
“I get impatient too quickly. I’m a damn-fool perfectionist. Forgive me.”
Now the “little” secretary opened the door. “Thought you might want a second cup of coffee, but you haven’t touched a thing,” she said reproachfully.
“I know. I’ve been thinking.”
“You’ve only got another fifteen minutes.”
Obediently, he unwrapped the sandwich now and leaned back in his chair. This room was where he really lived. It was the core and center of his life, when you came down to it. Here he sat to hear one anxious recital after the other, the tales of symptoms that would end either in success and health or in disaster. Each began here on the other side of this desk. Each was a new and terrifying adventure.
What did these people see when they first walked in here with the damp palms and the dry mouth of fear? They saw a neatly furnished room with cheerful pictures and many books. They saw a man with a calm, professional manner, a stranger on whose reputation their hopes were fixed. They could know nothing of his fears, his private guilt, empty longings and high ambition.
Jenny Jennings had put a sizable stack of mail before him to be answered. On top lay a still-unanswered letter from Mr. Braidburn. Martin hadn’t heard from him in years, hadn’t even gone to see him during the war. Why? Probably, to his shame, because he hadn’t wanted to be asked about Jessie or Claire.
Anyway, here was his letter, asking whether Martin had any suggestions for a most excellent young man who wanted to go to America. He had been doing some fine research in neuropathology and would like to combine that with further surgical training. Could Martin find a place for him in his laboratory?
Research! A kind of angry shame crept over Martin. What had he to offer such a man? Very little, except, as the practice kept growing, what Eastman had offered him: a chance to do important surgery and make money. There was nothing wrong in that But it wasn’t what he had had in mind at the beginning, was it?
And suddenly he thought of Albeniz, who had wanted his own institute, who had deserved it and who would have done a greater service to the sick if he could have had it Then it occurred to him that he had been so hurried lately that he hadn’t thought of Albeniz in months. So he picked up the telephone and, reaching the number, was told that the doctor was dead. He had died of a heart ailment almost a year ago. Martin must have missed the notice in the paper and so, apparently, had other people. Sic transit gloria. You are here, you make your little mark and you are forgotten.
Miss Jennings knocked at the door. “There’s a man outside,” she said, “without an appointment. He says you operated on his son-in-law this morning. The one who died.” She looked worried. “He seems all right, but do you want me to stay?” People have been known to be distraught and threatening, she meant.
“No,” he said, “it’s all right. Let him come in.”
Martin stood up and put out his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he began, “I can’t even begin to tell you, Mr.—”
“Ambrose. I was at the hospital this morning.” The man was slight, tired and apologetic “I just took my daughter home.”
“Oh,” Martin said again, “I’m so sorry! He was a fine young man.”
“We know you are, Doctor. But you did the best you could.”
“It wasn’t good enough.”
“It was too late. I knew that The poor boy didn’t; at least, I don’t think he did. Maybe he had thoughts and didn’t want to worry us. Who knows?”
The voice trailed away and Martin felt the heavy weight of sorrow in the room, the old familiar sorrow of his work, so acquainted with grief. “Acquainted with grief,” that poignant phrase from the Messiah, he thought, and then was aware that the man had said, “I knew.” He came quickly to himself.
“You knew? How could you have known?”
“No reason.” The man held his gray fedora on his knees and kept smoothing the crown with the palm of his hand, round and round. “It was just a feeling. So we talked about it, my daughter and I. We thought, if Michael dies, we want to know why.”
Because, Martin answered silently, the diagnosis was delayed. It wasn’t malpractice, it was just bad judgment, all too common. And there’s not enough cooperation between the fields.
“We want to help so that it won’t happen again. We’re not rich, but I have a few dollars put away, and I want to make a donation. I read in the papers about all this research in brain diseases, so I’ve written you a check, and we want you to use it wherever you think best. Put it where it will work so they can learn more about these things.”
The shining innocence, the goodness, the courage!
And gruffly, because those damned humiliating tears of his were rising, Martin said, “It’s five hundred dollars. I don’t want to take it. There are children, the twins—”
Mr. Ambrose stood up. “It’s all right, Dr. Farrell. We’ve decided. It’s the way she—we want it. And he would have wanted it, too.”
So they stood there looking at each other with the presence of the dead boy between them. Then Mr. Ambrose shook Martin’s hand. “Thanks, Doctor,” he said again, and Martin watched him go out.
Damn it to hell and back! Maybe that boy wouldn’t have died if—But maybe he would. Don’t play God, Martin. Yes, but maybe he wouldn’t.
He got up and walked around the room, picked up a book, put it back, went to the window, looked out and saw nothing but a dazzle on the street. Then he sat down at the desk again and vaguely saw the snapshots, old and new, under the glass: his children with Hazel; himself with Claire in front of an old wall on a proud visiting day at Smith; his father wearing a duster, standing on the running board of his first car.
“You will see things I haven’t even dreamed of,” Pa used to say, and Martin swore again.
Braidburn’s letter still lay on his desk. Oh, if he had a place to take in that young man, he knew exactly what it would be like! He’d planned it, outlined it on many a sleepless night.
Once he’d begun a study of pituitary tumors and abandoned it in the middle when he left old Llewellyn, years before. The whole problem of circulation in the brain—there was so much he wanted to find out! And it would have to be, need to be, combined with surgery. Then, of course, the psychiatrists would be welcome too; they’d be needed in problem-solving—
He thrust a fist into his palm. There’d be room then for Braidburn’s protégé, and many more. Perry, of course, to head anaesthesiology; good, dependable Perry at one’s side. And Leonard Max. Now there was a fellow in whom intelligence and devotion were written tall!
Jenny Jennings opened the door. “Seven waiting outside already,” she said accusingly.
Martin sighed. “All right Send the first one in.”
He walked slowly home. On a Madison Avenue corner, a discreet display in a window caught his eye. Behind a very fine antique desk, French, eighteenth century, stood a lacquered Oriental screen; an old engraving hung above it; the whole was most quietly elegant, made vivid with a splash of violet fabric. He stopped a moment to admire. The sign read: “Jessie Meig, Interiors.” He stood there gazing at the sign and remembered that Claire had said Jessie was expanding into new quarters.
Baffling and extraordinary, this life! So strange the ways in which we act on one another! There was Albeniz, now dead, who had lit the spark in him. There was this woman, Jessie, who had fanned the spark and given him Claire besides, the pearl, the treasure of his life. Then Hazel, the warm and tender. And always, always that other, hidden, and beloved—What am I doing in return for these? Martin thought, and, standing momentarily outside himself, saw himself in all the complexity and contradictions of his nagging, Calvinist conscience, his zeal and his zest.
As soon as he got into the house he went to his study, picked up the telephone and quickly, before his nerve should fail, called Robert Moser.
“Hello, Bob? This is Martin, Martin Farrell.”
“Everything all right with you?”
The voice held surprise. Martin had never called Moser at his home or anywhere else. Such contact as the families had was made by the women, by Moser’s wife calling Hazel, to be exact.
“Yes, all right, but I want to see you about something.”
“No trouble, I hope.”
“Not really. Or rather yes, in a way. I need money,” Martin said bluntly, and correcting the clumsiness, explained, “Not for myself. You may remember years ago I mentioned my—well, sort of pipe dream, I used to call it, of a neurological institute here at the hospital?”
“I remember.”
And Martin detected impatience, masked by courtesy.
“Well, something happened this morning. No need to go into details. But I’ve been galvanized into action. I’ve been thinking, when you want to do something, do it.”
“Can’t quarrel with that.” Amusement now, and a trace of skeptical suspicion.
“And since you’re a trustee, the only one I know, it seemed logical to begin with you.”
“Money’s not plentiful, Martin. We’re operating at a deficit. You know that.”
“Hospitals always do, don’t they? And somehow they always find what they need.”
“Yes, but you’re talking millions. Prices have soared since the war.”