Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  Dr. Rashower stiffened and his voice grew clipped. “Let’s understand each other, Mr. Watford—” With a snap of his head he indicated the nurse in question hovering behind him. “I will not tolerate disparagement of the nursing staff here. These people are tired and badly overworked. Mrs. Price in denying you medication was carrying out strict hospital policy. No medication until the attending physician has had an opportunity to examine the patient and prescribe medication and dosage himself. That’s for your own protection. And number two—it is highly unlikely that Dr. Shavers called in any such prescription—”

  “You’re not suggesting that I’m lying?”

  “I’m suggesting no such thing. All I’m suggesting is that I have no record that you are, in fact, a patient of Dr. Shavers. And in the absence of any records, I’m not going to treat you or prescribe anything. Not even aspirin.”

  “I see. Then you’re prepared to let me lie here and suffer. Is that it?”

  “Frankly, Mr. Watford, I can’t find a blessed thing wrong with you. Except for a bit of blood in your urine you appear to be a perfectly hardy specimen. I’ve got a call into Shavers right now and I ought to be able to clear this whole matter up within the hour. In the meantime, please stay put right here in the room.”

  The doctor nodded to the nurse, still cowering off to the side. He then turned abruptly on his heel.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this.” Watford’s voice grew shrill. “Shavers will have your head for this. You’ve got one hell of a malpractice suit on your hands now.”

  It must have taken Watford all of five minutes to dress and throw his few shaving and toilet articles into a paper bag. He was no longer even barely aware of the white-haired gentleman with whom he’d been chatting so pleasantly only a few minutes before. Still lying flat on his back, eyes closed as though in sleep, the man appeared completely oblivious to the recent flurry of excitement. The steady respiratory rise and fall of the blanket across his chest was deep and tranquil. It occurred to Watford that the man was trying to tell him something. Anxious though he was to get away, he stepped across to the bed and stooped over, the better to hear the man. He appeared half-conscious and was mumbling to himself. “Killed a man—last night—dropped a block on his head. Killed him—killed him.”

  “What—what’s that?” Watford gaped, then heard voices and footsteps approaching and forgetting the man, started up at once. Poking his head out the door of the room, the first thing he saw was a stern, hatchet-faced chief nurse glaring back at him from behind a reception counter at the center of the floor. She raised a cautionary finger as he started out. “Mr. Watford—”

  He didn’t stay around to hear the rest. He was off in a trice down the corridor with the chief nurse shouting his name, and a number of robed, shuffling inpatients turning to gaze after him in astonishment.

  With the sound of a heavy tread bearing down fast, he had no intention of waiting round for an elevator. Instead, he ducked at once through a door with a red bulb glowing directly above it. It led to an emergency stairway down which he plunged, three steps at a time. At the top of the stair he could hear the nurse’s voice booming into the empty stairwell, “Mr. Watford. Come back here. Mr. Watford—”

  She started down the stairs. Then, instead, ran back to the desk and phoned for guards and husky orderlies to head Watford off at the exits.

  By then Watford was three floors below, striding purposefully up a crowded corridor in the pediatric wing. No stranger to expedient departure, Watford was certain that a complete description of himself and his mode of attire had already been flashed to every guard in the building. Prudence strongly suggested that he remove himself temporarily from the scene.

  Passing down a corridor of small individual offices, the partially open door of one, apparently vacant, seemed a welcome invitation. He ducked in and closed the door behind him.

  It was a smart, compact space, lined floor to ceiling with books. A Danish teak desk sat in the center of the room on a small Oriental carpet, a large leather swivel chair behind it, and a pair of canvas slingback chairs before it. On the desk itself was a copy of the PDR (the Physician’s Desk Reference), a manila file folder with a name typed across it, and a large meerschaum recently smoked and still warm, lying on its side in an ashtray. Beside that lay a tobacco pouch and matches.

  From a walnut antique coat rack in the corner of the room, a long white physician’s coat hung with a stethoscope poking out the side pocket. Watford, barely pausing to reflect, had donned it.

  There was a light knock, and before Watford could respond the door swung open. Instantly, he snatched up the pipe, clapped it between his teeth and proceeded to scan the file before him. Looking up, he saw standing there, apparently as startled by Watford as he was by them, a somewhat apprehensive young couple. “Dr. Atwell?” inquired the husband.

  Watford required no further prompting. “Yes. I’m Dr. Atwell.”

  “We’re the Greeleys. We had an appointment.”

  A quick glance down at the folder he held quickly verified the name. Just outside and beyond the narrow shoulders of the husband, Watford saw two burley orderlies barrel past the open doorway. “Greeley. Oh, yes. Please come right in. Have a seat, won’t you?”

  Watford walked to the door, gently closed it behind them and returned to the desk with the air of a man who had occupied the space all of his life. He settled back in the chair, opposite the young couple, making a great show of bustling with the files on the desk top.

  “You’re here about—”

  “Our baby, Alice. We were recommended to you by our pediatrician, Dr. Blaustein.”

  “Oh, yes, Blaustein. Excellent man.” Watford tapped the ashes of the meerschaum into the tray, refilled it and with the most elaborate calm, relit the pipe. By that time he had fallen quite nicely into the role of the harried, much-in-demand Olympian, but nonetheless kindly, medical luminary. Despite all of the danger awaiting him just outside the door, he was rather relishing it. Not so much, however, that he’d lost all sense of self-preservation. He was keenly aware that the real Dr. Atwell, obviously on the premises, here precisely for this appointment, could, and probably would, reappear at any moment.

  Like a parched desert wanderer coming upon water, Watford opened the Greeley file and drank in information from the reports and EKG spools lying there. He began to read aloud, quickly under his breath, mouthing all the technical verbiage perfectly as if he were completely familiar with the details and merely just refreshing his mind. “Aortal insufficiency. Valvular defect. Congenital, of course. Poor little tyke.” In a swirl of pipe smoke, he glanced up at Mr. and Mrs. Greeley, who were gazing at him, both fear and adulation raging in their eyes.

  Watford felt a surge of power. “You can never be certain with these valvular problems,” he heard himself say suavely. “I’ve seen kids unable to catch their breath, already cyanotic, outgrow this sort of thing. One day they’re blue, next day they’re pink as peonies. Personally, I’m conservative. I’d prefer to watch her for six months more before I’d consider anything so drastic as surgical intervention. Quite frankly, from what I see here in Blaustein’s records and the EKGs, I’m not at all certain it’s warranted.” Gratitude and relief radiated from the youthful couple. Again, Watford heard footsteps pound past the outside door and he knew that time was pressing. He rose. “I’m afraid I rushed out without breakfast this morning. Look, why don’t the two of you join me downstairs for a cup of coffee? There’s a nice caféteria down there and we can go over Alice’s case more thoroughly.”

  By this time the Greeleys would have followed Watford out to the Jersey wetlands. Strolling and chatting in a most lively urbane fashion down the corridor to a bank of elevators, Watford in his flowing white coat gave a most convincing performance.

  On the ground floor, he was immediately aware that a uniformed guard had been posted at every exit. In the caféteria he guided the Greeleys to a table, sat them down, bustled up to a counter and bro
ught them back steaming mugs of coffee. “Now, if you’ll just wait one moment I’m going to get myself something a bit more substantial.”

  That was the last the Greeleys ever saw of Dr. Atwell or, for that matter, Charles Watford, for as they sipped their coffee and were thanking their lucky stars for the blessing of Dr. Atwell, Charles Watford had exited the caféteria and was striding purposefully down the hall past the uniformed guard who held the large glass doors open for him as he passed out into the sunny, lilac-scented streets of May.

  13

  Watford did not go right home. The preternatural cunning of the professional fugitive advised strongly against that. Disposing of his physician’s coat in a nearby trash can, but retaining the stethoscope for some future adventure, he hailed a cab. Since the day was mild and springlike, a Sunday as well, he thought he would go to the park. He had about thirty dollars in his pocket, certainly adequate for a pleasant day’s outing.

  His performance as a great pediatric surgeon, followed by his daredevil escape from the hospital, filled him with a kind of boyish glee. Several times during the ride uptown he laughed out loud, then finding the cabby’s wary eyes on him in the rearview mirror, he launched into a wildly extended fiction about how he had just, inadvertently, been the prime figure in the apprehension of a dangerous drug addict at Beth Israel. The driver was enchanted. Shortly they were the best of friends, trading stories about crime and the dangers of the city. When they arrived at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the zoo, Watford rewarded the man with a handsome three-dollar tip.

  In the zoo at last, amid a bustling, cheerful weekend crowd, Watford ceased to be a fugitive. Among the Sunday strollers he was just another man or, more accurately, another child. Carefree, giddy, he tossed peanuts to the elephants. At feeding time he stood amid crowds of laughing, squealing children as they watched fish being flung to the seals leaping and yawping in the pool. In the monkey house he watched in dazzled awe the vaulting acrobatics of the spider monkeys, the rhesus and the capuchins. Nearby, the polar bear paced restlessly the narrow confines of his caged den, and near the seal pool a street entertainer dressed in a yellow jerkin and green tights, a dunce cap, and pointed slippers, played a horn pipe and pantomimed fairy tales for the gathering crowds. The children laughed, but the overall effect on Watford had been a curious melancholy.

  Later, eating a rubbery frankfurter beneath the orange umbrella of a park vendor, he watched the spastic promenade of bronze animals round the park clock above the North Gate, playing their bronze instruments and proclaiming the hour. He had a sudden flashing image of the clockworks within— the hour wheel turns the minute wheel; the pin on the minute wheel raises the lever; the lever extends to the rear plate and has two arms attached to it; the lower arm contacts the pins on the driving wheel, and the upper arm contacts the pin on the arresting wheel. When the minute wheel turns, the heel of the lever falls off the pin of the minute wheel. At the same time the lower arm of the lever between the plates falls between the count pins on the driving wheel. The striking train is released, and the minute wheel starts the hour count. The striking is accomplished by the pins on the minute wheel lifting the arm which is attached to the hammer. When the last stroke is struck—

  Watford stood in a cold sweat, chewing numbly his frankfurter as the toylike animals swayed and lurched round the track, the chimes gonged, and a voice receded in his head. A moment later he flung the remains of his frankfurter into a nearby trash can, and fled the zoo, certain he was being followed by the police.

  Reluctant to go home, he made his way across the park and wandered uptown in the direction of the Museum of Natural History. He recalled with great affection going there as a boy. Often he would go with his mother . His father professed a hatred of the place. Later, throughout adolescence, he would go by himself, particularly fond of it on cold wintry afternoons, with the snow falling silently outside in the park, festooning in a gauzy silver the sere, withered branches of the dogwood and cherry trees across the way.

  The museum had those cozy associations for him, the sense of coming out of the cold into an absolutely secure environment; his favorite food at the caféteria on the ground floor—a plate of homemade spicy baked beans with a mug of dark sweet hot cocoa, sometimes alternating with hot cider.

  Then afterward, walking solitary and a little frightened down the hall of mammoths—great tuskers and stuffed mastodons who had trod the earth at the dawn of time. A turn to the right and into the hushed darkened corridors of dioramas—those small, illuminated boxes behind glass that would whisk him to an Amazonian rain forest, to the frozen Siberian tundra, to a pygmy village in Gabon, to a dark, snow-covered forest in the Himalayas where a Siberian tiger gnawed the bloody haunch of a fallen stag.

  Watford wandered the museum that afternoon for nearly three hours, slightly dejected and unable to rekindle any sense of the wonder or delicious dread he had experienced there as a boy. The mystery was mostly gone now. The fearsome tuskers in the hall of mammoths looked innocuous and vaguely comic, like badly worn stuffed animals. The beans in the caféteria were tasteless and canned and the cocoa was watery.

  He left somewhere shortly after 5:00 p.m. Still unwilling to return home, he wandered down Eighth Avenue and into Times Square. Neon lights were just going on against the gray twilight sky. The streets were dirty and the stale air of daily lurid commerce hung like a sour pall above the place. Along with the pageantry of hawkers, greasers and pimps, were the three-card-monte dealers and the drab painted ladies.

  At a loss for anything better to do, Watford wandered into a penny arcade. The air was charged with the numbing din of electrical games and canned acid rock booming over loudspeakers. A tired haze of kif floated uneasily through the place. Watford made his way through pinball, Skee-Ball, Pokerama, and a variety of electrical video-screen games that buzzed a great deal but amounted to no more than following the bouncing ball. When he ran out of single dollar bills, he left. Walking out once more into the electric glare of night, he found the whole thieves’ carnival out in force.

  Leaning against a corner stand he ate disconsolately a slice of pizza, and observed the spectacle. He wished somehow to be a part of it, but in the end he was repelled. He did not drink alcohol; the idea of casual sex, particularly sex for money, was repugnant; and that air of imminent violence pervading the place finally drove him off.

  He walked several blocks east to the IND and took an F train home to Queens. He had no idea of what he would find when he got there, but in the quiet, elm-lined street of middle-class row homes where he lived, what he suspected he might find actually came to pass.

  The police patrol car, its lights out, waited about 150 feet south of his front door on the opposite side of the street. He could see the glowing orange tips from the cigarettes of the two policemen inscribing arcs behind the windshield of the patrol car. The hospital had lost little time, indeed, notifying the police of the questionable activities of one of its patients, a Mr. Charles Watford, of 724 Hauser Street, Kew Gardens, New York.

  The moment Watford spotted the car he ducked back into the doorway of a darkened tailor shop. In the window a headless dress form made of wires and white rubber foam glowed with a spectral radiance.

  Watford’s one advantage was that he had spotted them before they’d spotted him. Fear rushing back at him, senses acutely heightened, he reverted instantly to the psychology of the quarry. Waiting several minutes in the doorway of the tailor shop, he concluded the patrol car was not about to leave too quickly. He lingered a moment longer, then pulling his collar up about his neck, he stepped out of the doorway and strolled casually back up the street to a small cinema specializing in reruns of old foreign films. He purchased a ticket and went inside.

  The film they featured that evening was an old British import called Séance on a Wet Afternoon. In it, Richard Attenborough played a drab nonentity of a man who gets caught up in his wife’s schemes for extracting money as a hired medium from a couple trying to comm
unicate with their dead child.

  The playing time of the film was approximately eighty minutes. When Watford came out there were, inexplicably, tears in his eyes as he strolled warily back round the corner to Hauser Street.

  Once again he positioned himself in the doorway of the tailor shop where the dress form in the window glowed more eerily than ever. From where he stood he could see that the patrol car had gone. The spot was now occupied by a late model Dodge panel van.

  A congenital fugitive, the mere surface appearance of an “all clear” was not enough to convince him. Carefully, his eyes scanned both sides of the street to see if the patrol car had simply moved someplace else. He understood enough about the police to know that surveillance teams could also switch their tactic of waiting in one spot to that of cruising periodically round an area.

  When he had satisfied himself on both scores, he surged back out into Hauser Street with an almost jaunty air to number 724, and whistling softly beneath his breath, let himself in the front door.

  He lit no lights, but slipped out of his shoes and like a cat padded noiselessly up the stairs to his bedroom at the rear of the house.

  In less than ten minutes, working deftly in the dark, he had packed a canvas suitcase with everything he might need for a somewhat protracted stay. He had no idea of his ultimate destination that night. When he had completed the packing, he inserted into the same suitcase his doctor’s black leather bag, complete with an assortment of medical paraphernalia collected over the years—retinoscope, sphygmomanometer for blood pressure readings, his newly acquired stethoscope, a variety of hypodermics and needles, as well as a full range of prescription drugs, including an ample supply of meperidine—his beloved “Mother Demerol.” He also packed a physician’s prescription pad bearing the name and number of a Dr. Michael Breuer—to guarantee him sufficient refills of anything he wanted. As a final touch, he added his beloved PDR, and a Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, for him Holy Scripture to which he attributed dark powers, mysteries indited in a language so heady and seductive as to have an almost aphrodisiac effect upon him.