by Farris, John
Chapter Four
Larue telephoned the Bellaver house from the lobby of Roosevelt Hospital. The housekeeper, Mrs. Busk, switched her to Katharine Bellaver's secretary. Miss Chowenhill came on and asked rapid-fire questions. Where and when did it happen? How had Gillian acted prior to collapsing? Did she hit her head when she fell? And what was the name of the intern in charge? Find out, please, and have him call me in ten minutes at this number.
In the interval Miss Chowenhill made several calls, the first to Gillian's pediatrician for a fast medical history. No, she was not allergic to any of the common broad-spectrum antibiotics. The second call was to the senior partner of a very old law firm that devoted seventy percent of its time to Bellaver family business. Gillian's godfather. He cut short a partner's meeting and was driven uptown to the hospital. She called the director of Roosevelt and left a message. She called one of the half-dozen finest neurosurgeons in the world.
By then a chief medical resident at Roosevelt was on another line. Miss Chowenhill gently made him aware of the fact that he had a very important patient on his hands, and that Gillian soon would be under the scrutiny of a team of specialists, as much talent as you could pack into one room.
The resident was cooperative and candid. He didn't know what the hell it was. They couldn't rule out anything at this point, including meningitis. Her fever had spiked to nearly 106, and she was having difficulty breathing. She'd had a small convulsion. They had packed her in ice and placed her in an oxygen tent. Gillian was on fluids and Tylenol and phenobarbital to inhibit further convulsions, and he recommended 1.2 million units of ampicillin immediately, if it wouldn't disagree with her. Miss Chowenhill okayed the ampicillin.
After the resident rang off she consulted Katharine's calendar for the day, skillfully read between the lines and located Katharine at the Greenwich Village apartment of a playwright she'd been seeing a lot of lately.
Avery Bellaver was more difficult to run to ground. He had no secretary and no routine. On occasion he had departed for places like Honduras or the Kaoko Veld without telling anyone he might be gone for a month. Miss Chowenhill tried the family foundation. She tried societies, clubs and colleagues. It took her an hour and a half to ferret him out of a dim subcellar of the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West.
On Bank Street in the Village Katharine thought briefly about trying to coax Howard Wrightnour back into bed for some kind of fast windup, which she desperately needed. But one look at him, slump-shouldered and smoking a cigarette at her feet, discouraged her without turning her off.
Howard was a large man with snappish black eyes and a khan's mustache; women commonly eyed him and thought rape, but in truth he was a gentle and sensitive lover, perhaps cursed with too much sensitivity, because any kind of disturbance was fatal to his concentration. If one of his goldfish hiccupped at the wrong time, that was the end of it. Howard thought Katharine had taken the receiver off the telephone, and Katharine thought Howard—. He was sulking now, a little ashamed of himself.
When she was dressed she hugged and tongued him like a mother cat, bringing him out of his mood.
"I really have to run."
"I hope Gillian is okay."
"She didn't seem to be feeling well this morning. But a fever that high—"
"It's not so serious in someone her age. I mean it's not necessarily—"
"I'll call you. Don't you think Brent's reaction in the second act would be impotent fury?"
Howard pondered the suggestion and nodded.
"I'll try it that way."
Katharine smiled tensely and left him.
There were men in her life who excited her much more than Howard Wrightnour, but no one who needed her half as much. Thanks to her he would finish his play, the Big One to follow his off-Broadway critical success, the drama that would put Howard up there with O'Neill. If her own writing suffered while she was nurturing Howard, well, there was satisfaction in being midwife to a significant artistic event. She would have money in the production, of course, not the whole shot but enough to ensure that his play would be done in style.
Katharine drove her car, an indigo-blue Porsche with DPL plates, uptown to Fifty-ninth. Chowenhill had been guarded on the phone. Obviously Gillian was quite ill, and the ferocity with which she had been struck down alarmed Katharine. She left her car where it was handy, in some strictly forbidden area of the hospital grounds, and went in.
Five minutes later she was at the bedside of the semiconscious Gillian, who seemed not to recognize her.
"Good God," Katharine said fervently. "What is it, Wally?"
The lawyer, whose name was Wallace Mockreed, put a hand on her shoulder.
"Can't tell. If it's a virus, they'll find it in her blood. And they need a spinal."
"As soon as possible," the resident in neurophysiology said. "Her fever is down now, but that may be temporary."
Katharine looked at him with a wide vacant smile.
"Spinal tap? I'd prefer to have Dr. McKinstry do that. He's a specialist. I don't want anyone else to touch her. He's coming, isn't he, Wally?"
"Right away. Don't worry."
"And where is Avery?"
"Coming."
Katharine looked again at Gillian, at the half-open uncomprehending eyes flushed by the fever of unknown origin. For the first time she felt the full impact of what might be a tragedy. She then felt a little faint, but she lingered over details that were inexpressibly precious to her. Faint smudge of Gillian's eye shadow; the tiny gold ring in one earlobe; the clean white center part of Gillian's hair. The artistic hands of her child, those fine long fingers and—nibbled nails. How often had she complained, nagged, blown her stack? "Habit portrays character. Bad habits attract bad opinions." Gillian went right on shredding her fingernails. A lot of things went through Katharine's mind in a matter of moments. That night shortly before Gillian's twelfth birthday when Gillian crept up to her room, balled underpants in one hand. Rusty red spot the size of a half dollar on the pants. "Is this it?" she'd asked, anxious and hopeful. Katharine thought about how much trouble it was to get Gillian to dress up, and how there was always something amiss with even her most stylish clothes: a smudge or a streak or an inexplicable wrinkle, buttons gone or dangling, so that she looked set-upon, or burgled.
"I think I'd like to smoke," Katharine said in a low voice.
In the hallway of the general medical unit she took Larue's arm. "You've been so much help, I don't know how to thank you."
"It was so sudden. I know Gillian wasn't feeling all that good, but she didn't complain. I hope she—"
"Gillian's going to be all right. Larue, you look tired. Shouldn't you be getting home? Wally, would you see that Larue has a cab? Tell your father I've heard nothing but good things about his new play. We'll call just as soon as we have news about Gillian."
News was a long time coming. Specialists trooped in and out. They held conferences. A lab report came down: it was not meningitis. Nevertheless Gillian's temperature fluctuated between 103.5 and 105 degrees. She was placed on a thermal mattress. She dozed, awoke, spoke deliriously to several people, none of whom were in the room with her. Her respiration was shallow; glands in her neck remained swollen, which suggested a viral infection, despite a normal throat appearance. The hematocrit was within a normal range. Her platelet count was minimum normal, but the leukocyte, or white blood cell, count was on the low side, not uncommon with a number of diseases, including influenza.
Avery Bellaver took his wife to dinner at a place near Lincoln Center, an area filled with gimmicky restaurants that serve miserable food. This one celebrated old-time aviators. Captains of the clouds. Devil dogs of the air. A Fokker replica hung from the ceiling. There were sepia murals of exploding aircraft. The waiters wore stovepipe boots, those cunning leather helmets that fit like bathing caps, goggles and long white scarves that occasionally trailed in the meals they served.
The Bellavers concentrated on a pretty good wine
list and ate sparingly.
In the past three years they had spent fewer hours together than Katharine spent at her dentist's. It would have surprised even her closest friends to know that she had any affection for Avery at all; according to their thinking she hung on to the marriage for all the correct reasons, the least of which was money. She'd won her place in the family, was tolerated by the women and respected by those Bellaver men who didn't actually covet her. Avery Bellaver was the clan anomaly: obscure, strange and unapproachable. It was admirable that she had landed him, went the smart talk, but then she'd worked, darling, all those years, getting long in the tooth while appealing to his mind and then his glands, probing, probing deftly to find a human response or two, thereafter making the most of his no-doubt feeble urges.
Katharine had heard all the gossip and thoroughly enjoyed it. She'd never made the least effort to explain her husband to anyone. His sexual urges had been and were still quite strong, thank you; the gossips seemed to have forgotten her two miscarriages a year apart. Then had come Gillian and the simultaneous tragedy nobody knew about, which decided her against further pregnancies. She still looked forward to going to bed with Avery on those occasions when mood and opportunity coincided. As for his social shortcomings, he was less shy than preoccupied. He was no good with the self-important and aggressive examples of the species, whether cab driver, maitre d', social parasite or ersatz royalty. He was not a gamesman. Politics alternately bored and frightened him. Avery's obsessions were vastly more rewarding and of some value to mankind. He wanted, for instance, to learn everything he could about the daily life of a remote Mexican Indian village he'd been visiting for twenty-five years. Once, early in the marriage, Katharine had accompanied him to Mtecla, had seen the entire village turn out to greet Avery Bellaver. He spoke their dialect and knew all their names. In this hot, dry land the hesitant bumbler disappeared; he was at ease, under no compunction to behave as a Bellaver is supposed to behave. They were not a peaceful people, they were suspicious of strangers and had stoned missionaries to death, but his respect for them inspired trust and even love.
Katharine had similar feelings for her husband, though his life was not her life and she needed the attentions of many men. She was decent about her appetite, arranging trysts so they couldn't be a source of embarrassment to him. Avery had never hurt her and she would never hurt him, the purest definition of love Katharine had to offer.
Avery studied a mural-sized portrait of a long-ago lieutenant.
"I was four years old when my brother was commissioned," he said. "He looked like that. I was in awe of him."
"Did he die during the war?"
"Yes, but not in combat. He slipped on some icy stairs in Amiens and broke his neck."
"What was his name again? Oh, Charles. Mother Min wanted us to name our first-born after Charles." Katharine finished her third glass of a '64 Bordeaux. She was feeling the effect of the wine and the vodka martinis that had come before. "Do you think about him?"
"About my brother?"
"No. About our son. About the one who didn't live. Gillian's twin."
He shook his head. "Do you think about him?"
"Yes. Sometimes. I wonder what he'd be like if he had lived. And Gillian thinks about him, or she used to. She asked a lot of questions. I explained, as best I could, about the cord. I told her there just wasn't anything to be done. If he'd survived, he'd have been a vegetable." Katharine grimaced. "The fever. If it stays high long enough it'll just ruin Gillian's brain. Short out the synapses or something. How cruel for her to get this far, then—. She'll be—."
"Katharine."
"I know, I know. But I can't help feeling shaky. All things considered, our luck's too good. So we lose one in childbirth, but there's a bonus baby. The goddamn Bellaver luck. We're not all that charming and we've never been a national craze, but unlike the poor bedeviled Kennedys—let me see the check, please."
She took it from Avery as he was about to pay, did some quick addition.
"You've overcharged us a dollar and a half," Katharine told the waiter, who pretended to be grief-stricken. Later she said fondly to her husband, "They'll try to do it to you every time." Avery just smiled, bemused.
On their return trip to the hospital they were introduced to Dr. Hubert Tofany of the Division of Tropical Medicine at Columbia University.
"I understand you both travel a great deal. Could you give me a rundown on where you've been during the past six or eight months? You needn't bother with airport layovers."
"Do you think we could have brought back some kind of bug?" Katharine asked. "We'd have been sick ourselves."
"Not necessarily. At the Yale arbovirus lab they have a rap sheet on approximately four hundred viruses, most of them obscure, all potentially dangerous, and each has its own peculiarities. They incubate in mysterious ways. There are viruses that bother adults hardly at all, but they're devastating to children. And the reverse is true. We'll take a blood sample from each of you. What we'd like to do now is move Gillian into an isolation bed at Washington Heights. We're better equipped there to do the kind of serological analysis necessary to track down the . . . culprit. A serum may be available."
Katharine looked at her husband, who said, "We . . . my wife entertains frequently. We have visitors from all over the world. It could just as easily be someone we've had to dinner."
Dr. Tofany smiled patiently.
"I'd like as complete a list as possible. All recent house guests."
Katharine said, "Tracking them all down, that could take a lot of time."
"Yes."
"Meanwhile if you can't find out what it is—if it's something you've never seen before—"
"We'll continue the indicated protocol. Combinations of antibiotics. Sometimes, even with a new strain of virus, the patient is able to produce antibodies to destroy it. Try not to worry, Mrs. Bellaver."
They visited Gillian briefly while arrangements were made to transfer her to the hospital at One Hundred Sixty-Seventh and Broadway.
"She's been talking again," the licensed practical nurse told them.
"Hello, darling," Katharine said. "Poor baby."
Gillian opened her eyes and looked at her through the oxygen tent.
"Ruh," she whispered.
"What did she say?" Avery asked. "Would you say that again, Gillian?"
"She hasn't been very clear," the LPN reminded them with a smile.
Gillian began screaming.
It took three of them, Katharine, Avery and Dr. Tofany, to keep her from tearing free of the IV needles, from tearing the oxygen tent apart.
The seizure, and the screaming, continued for almost half a minute. Her strength was the strength of insanity, or desperation.
"Larue!" she cried, and subsided, as wet as if she'd stepped out of a shower.
"Restraints, Doctor?" the nurse said.
Tofany was checking the IV placements.
"No. Sponge her off."
Katharine retied Gillian's hospital gown, which had almost come off during her struggle. Blood throbbed in Katharine's temples and her fingers didn't work too well. There was a small cross, of gold and black onyx, on a chain around Gillian's neck. She had never seen it before.
"Shouldn't the phenobarb keep her quiet?" Katharine asked.
"Yes. What was that she was saying, do either of you—?”
"She was calling Larue. That's her friend, the girl she was skating with today. Avery, where did the cross come from?"
"I've never seen it before."
"Nurse!" Dr. Tofany said harshly.
"Yes, Doctor?"
"Don't touch her!"
"But you—"
"Have you touched her since you came on?"
"No, sir, that was just a few minutes—"
"Go get your hand attended to. Don't you have better sense than to come into a sickroom with an open wound?"
The LPN stared at him. He nodded curtly at her right hand. She looked at the blood-soaked B
and-Aid on the back of the hand and gasped.
"My Lord!"
"We're dealing with a virus here we don't know anything about. This kind of unforgivable carelessness—"
"Doctor, I don't understand. This was just a scratch. It hardly bled at all two days ago—"
"It's bleeding now. Copiously. Get out of here."
The nurse hurried out. Katharine took another look at the pale, becalmed Gillian and followed the nurse from the room. She went to a telephone, looked in her purse for a number which Larue had scribbled for her and dialed shakily. The phone rang six times before a sleepy voice answered.
"Larue?" She could hear a television playing.
"Uh-huh."
"This is Katharine Bellaver."
"Oh, hi, Mrs. Bellaver. Timezit?"
"A little after nine."
"I fell asleep. All that exercise—is Gil okay?"
"She's being moved to Washington Heights Hospital. There's a chance you've been exposed to something very contagious. We don't know yet."
"I feel fine."
"Are you there by yourself?" Katharine asked.
"Dad has some people in."
For the first time since Gillian had screamed Katharine was able to relax.
"Then you're all right."
She heard a stifled yawn, which was followed by a puzzled response. "Yes, ma'am. When will I be able to see Gillian?"
"Not for a few days. She'll be in isolation until they're sure of what she has. If you notice any symptoms at all, even if you think you're just coming down with a cold, call us."
"I will."
"Larue? Do you know anything about a gold and onyx cross Gillian is wearing?"
"Oh! It's mine. I know she's not into religion, but I was so upset when she passed out . . . while we were waiting for the ambulance to come I put it around her neck. The cross was blessed by a Jesuit who my mother considers to be a very holy man. I didn't think it would do any harm. I hope you don't mind."
"Of course not. That was very thoughtful, Larue. I'll keep in touch."
For a couple of minutes after she'd hung up Katharine leaned against the wall near the telephone, feeling dull and drained; a headache was coming on. Gillian's frantic screaming was too much with her; it was her daughter's agony for Larue that had sent Katharine witlessly to the telephone. It seemed almost as if Gillian had willed it, directed her to make the call. But nothing was wrong; there was no emergency. Larue was at home and safe.