The Hills’ farm bore so much produce that there was surplus, and Raymond decided to open a small store at the corner of the dirt road that ran in front of his house. Mexican laborers began stopping by to purchase tomatoes and sweet peppers for lunch, and beans and potatoes to carry across the river to their homes in villages where the land was still burned and not blessed by irrigation. Quickly the Hills branched out, adding work clothing, notions, seeds, and farm equipment to their inventory. Hill’s Corner, as the place became known, soon had a blacksmith, a barber, and a gas pump, and under Myra’s efficient stewardship the entire stock usually turned over every two months, grossing $1,500 a week.
John Hill was the second child, born in 1931, wedged between his older sister Judy and his brother Julian, who appeared one year later. But unlike most youngsters in the middle, who tend to be quiet and insecure, John was dominant. His energies and curiosities from the time he was a toddler were remarkable. Myra grew weary and exasperated trying to contain both her son and her household. Dishes crashed to the floor when John chanced by, lamps fell down, once a console radio was dismantled by the not yet three-year-old, who found it necessary to pull all the tubes from the innards. While his parents were away at the Mayo Clinic having Raymond’s appendicitis attended to, John completely took apart a Perfection oil cooking stove, his mother’s pride. Finally Myra Hill took a drastic step; she literally tied up her son, attaching him to a harness and a thin chain that allowed him to roam about a carefully prescribed area in the front yard. If he tried to reach the road the chain would yank him back, like an errant puppy dog.
The two brothers grew up inseparable, both fascinated by machines. When their model airplanes and miniature autos and chemistry experiments overflowed their room, Raymond Hill built a small building next to the home to accommodate his sons’ hobbies. There dangled planes on wires from the ceiling, with the air redolent of glue and rotten-egg sulphur. The boys were very different, both physically and emotionally. John was the outgoing, impulsive one, with a tendency to overweight. Julian was the quiet son, with a gaunt, almost Lincolnesque face and frame. So somber was the second son that a family friend often wondered, but did not ask, if there was trouble, or pain, within him.
Myra was the disciplinarian, her husband having no desire for the unpleasant scenes that accompanied punishment. He preferred to stay in the fields or behind the store counter, muttering an occasional “Just do what your mother says.” The symbol of Myra’s discipline was a whip which she once used with vigor, then hung on the wall in a prominent place. When the boys entertained the thought of mischief, all Myra had to do was point at the menacing object, and the reminder was sufficient.
Fervently Myra molded her children into her church, making religion so much a part of their lives at such an early age that they grew to consider it as natural as eating and sleeping. When John was not yet two, his mother began teaching a Sunday school class, and long after he had gone away to college she presided over the same weekly session. Myra took pride in her Bible classes, for she taught not only the philosophies and verses of the book but its attendant history and politics and geographies as well. At home, the children dutifully recited Bible verses as they made beds or washed and dried dishes. On the way to nearby Harlingen to shop, they played car games always revolving around their knowledge of the Bible. “You start a Bible verse with the letter A,” directed Myra to one son, and, to the other, “then you follow with a verse beginning with B.” By their adolescence, both boys could name every book of the Bible in order from Genesis to Revelations, and the genealogy from Adam to Jesus Christ.
“Religion is not a duty,” Myra liked to say. “Religion is happiness. And ours is not the ‘devil’s-behind-the-door’ kind that scares people into doing right. Ours is joy!”
Both boys became serious musicians, ironic in consideration that their first exposure to song was in a church that forbade musical instruments of any kind. In the Church of Christ, only the human voice is permitted. “We make melody with our lips,” explained Myra to her sons when they were small.
Though Myra adhered slavishly to the dictates of her faith, she had no objection to her sons playing musical instruments away from the church house. In fact she encouraged both to study piano, pointing out that musical talent ran traditionally in her branch of the family. A favorite story concerned an uncle who made pianos by hand in Illinois, then vanished from the family bosom for seventeen years, only to finally turn up with a trunkful of music he had composed.
All three of her children thus received piano lessons, with Myra holding them firmly to disciplined practice hours. John was the most dedicated, often sitting for three hours at the bench, rising only to chase his less willing brother about the house and forcefully dragging him to the metronome when it was time to practice duets. He also learned to handle the trombone, tuba, flute, and recorder, the medieval flutelike instrument.
When John became so skilled in music that he transferred to a high school out of his district because a better band program was offered, Myra began to fret. She wanted more for her talented son than to have him play piano for a dance orchestra, he having once made flip suggestion of that as a possible life’s work. From his early years, his mother had been pushing medicine. “There are ten doctors in my family,” Myra kept reminding John, and Julian as well. “I’d be so proud if my two sons became the eleventh and twelfth.”
But John did not seem responsive to his mother’s importunings. “I don’t know what I want to be,” he said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” At Abilene Christian College, an institution sponsored by the Church of Christ, John enrolled in a liberal arts course. There he fell under the influence of an excellent teacher, a biologist, and during Christmas vacation in his sophomore year he gave his mother the gift she had always wanted. He had decided to go to medical school.
His brother Julian announced a similar intent, and Myra prayed exuberant thanks to her God. Never was a mother so blessed, she said. Two fine sons, both gentle, both scholarly, both musicians, both about to become doctors. “They are noble children,” she thought to herself, falling to prayer. “They are the gifts of God.”
After graduating summa cum laude from college, John was accepted at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston where he completed the four-year course and internship, electing then for a residency in surgery. It was not an uncommon decision for young doctors in this city in the middle 1950s. A veritable factory of surgery was developing under the charismatic leadership of Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the flame-tempered Louisianan who was courting world attention by his arterial reconstruction and routing of blood streams clogged by atherosclerosis. At his side was the talented young associate, Dr. Denton Cooley, who was on his way to world rank as a surgeon of the open heart. Their aura and attendant publicity persuaded a disproportionate number of fledgling doctors to choose cardiovascular surgery. So many that John Hill, who liked Houston and wanted to live there permanently, decided the competition in that part of the body was absurd. Heart surgeons were coming out of the walls.
He studied the alternatives carefully and, by the third year of his residency, chose plastic surgery. Several factors worked toward that decision. One was basic. Money. Only ten board-certified plastic surgeons were practicing in this city of more than a million people, and in addition to the native population, tens of thousands of potential patients would be swarming the Texas Medical Center each year as a score of planned new hospitals opened. Plastic surgery would surely flourish with the other medical disciplines. Houston was a city of wealth, brimming with women and men able to pay for face-lifts and eyebag removals. And such procedures could normally be done quickly. The skilled plastic man could schedule six or eight procedures in one day, the potential revenues enormous.
John Hill wanted money. He looked about the city where it seemed to grow like rye grass after a January rain, and he saw the jeweled patrons of drinking clubs where he sometimes played cocktail piano to help pay room and board
at the dump where he lived. He drove into River Oaks and looked at the massive monuments to money owned by the very doctors over whose patients he labored as a resident for little more than a hundred dollars a month. He told a fellow resident, “In my home town, a doctor might pull down $25,000 a year. I don’t see a reason in the world why a plastic surgeon couldn’t make $250,000 a year once he’s off and running in Houston.”
His friend nodded in agreement. The sum sounded reasonable. Gossip among the younger men had DeBakey and Cooley each billing more than a half million dollars a year in surgical fees. Cooley did open hearts the way other men ran laps at the YMCA. Ten a day were not unusual. At $1,500 a pop. In all endeavor, the Houston syndrome was not so much how good, but how much, and how many.
John needed money to finance his musical interests, for the seed that Myra planted in her son when she pushed him into piano lessons at the age of seven had sprouted into an unusual commitment. “I’d really rather be a musician,” he told a fellow doctor as they sewed up a gunshot wound at Ben Taub, the city’s charity hospital. “But a fellow can’t make a decent living out of it. My dream is to practice medicine in the daytime and play music at night. One of the reasons I’m going into plastics is that the patients don’t call you up all night long with bellyaches.” At that moment John had one ear cocked to a portable radio from which a piano concerto was booming forth in a corner of the surgical suite.
His reputation in the surgical program was that of a pleasant, likable young doctor, of potential talent, but one who was not wholly dependable. A senior surgeon grew to believe that John also took liberties with the truth. This cropped up when an indigent drunk with a bad liver appeared at the hospital with a belly swollen from fluids.
The procedure for alleviating the condition is called paracentesis, a routine operation wherein the surgeon cuts a hole in the stomach and simply drains out the fluids. The only real danger is cutting the bowel and releasing potentially deadly bacteria into the body.
John Hill did just that. When he began the drawing out of the fluids, he also sucked out feces, clear indication that his blade had perforated the bowel. It can happen to the best of surgeons, who must then hurry into an emergency bowel repair. But rather than own up to the mistake, John continued draining the fluids, then sewed up the abdomen and bandaged the incision. The patient developed peritonitis and died. In autopsy, the blunder was discovered and Hill was summoned before the senior surgeon. At first he flatly denied knowledge of the bowel perforation, then hedged by insisting that, if such had happened, it seemed so minor that a bowel repair was not warranted. “That guy had a million defenses,” the examining surgeon said later. “I let him go with a severe reprimand. He was so charming and so eager that I didn’t want to wreck his career over one mistake.”
Among those who train students to become doctors, it is said that surgeons find their niche in accordance with their personal characteristics. The orthopedic surgeon is medicine’s carpenter—up to his elbows in plaster of Paris—and tradition holds that he is a gruff, slapdash sort of man whose labor is in a very physical area of healing. Away from the hospital, the orthopedists are often hunters, boaters, outdoorsmen. The neurosurgeon, classically, does not get too involved with his patients. Or, for the matter, with anybody. They are cool men, blunted, rarely gregarious. Heart surgeons are thundering egotists, star performers in a dazzling operating theater packed with assistants, nurses, paramedics, and a battery of futuristic equipment which could seemingly lift the room into outer space. These are men who relish drama, who live life on the edge of the precipice.
And the plastic surgeon? He is, by nature, a man of art, and temperament, and sensitivity. “We are the artists who deal in beauty lost, or beauty that never was,” said one plastic man at a national convention. “Our stitches are hidden, and so are our emotions.” John Hill fit perfectly into this category.
As commanded, Maggie Foster invited Joan Robinson to dine at her home, with John Hill as the extra man. The couple hit it off well, making the tentative explorations and awkward remarks that men and women do when they are interested in one another. As she watched the mating dance, Maggie Foster thought to herself: this is a terrible mismatch. These two people have nothing whatsoever in common except they are both beautiful. She is rich, spoiled, bored, looking for a new husband. She knows horses and night clubs and where Pa keeps his checkbook. John Hill knows how to play the trombone and make sutures. He is a mama’s boy who winces every time Joan says ‘god damn,’ which is often.
Joan kept the evening merry, her throaty, almost mannish laughter continuing past midnight. She was the kind of woman indigenous to Texas—intensely feminine for one moment, and then, spitting out an obscenity, becoming one of the boys. John Hill was cleaved by lightning. He told Maggie Foster in a bread-and-butter telephone call early the next morning, “She’s the most incredible girl I ever met.”
Joan Robinson was on the telephone as well, spreading the news among her friends that she had met a “divine new man.” One of her horse set pals, a girl named Cleo who was given to blunt questions, asked pointedly, “Did you tell this old boy you’ve already struck out twice?”
No. Joan had not revealed that news. If things got serious, she would, of course, tell him. With her track record, Joan said practically, she did not think Dr. John Hill had cause for undue concern. “He’s just a very nice man,” Joan told her friend. “I need one right now.”
The young doctor’s life underwent sudden and radical surgery. Within weeks he began traveling in a world that he knew existed—but into whose gates he had not anticipated admission for years to come. On their very first private date together, Joan fetched the surgeon at his rooming house, turned over the wheel of her Cadillac to him, and suggested a quiet steak restaurant where they could dine and talk intimately. When the maître d’ presented the menu, Joan noticed her escort wince at the prices. Tactfully she excused herself to freshen her make-up. Out of John’s sight, she instructed the maître d’ to send the dinner check to Ash by mail. She then returned to the table and whispered, “The prices here are outrageous, but order anything you like. They always comp the check. I let them use my name in the columns.”
Somehow a relationship developed, he feigning interest in five-gaited horses, she listening politely to Bach quartets. They dined on hamburgers at a greasy spoon near the hospital, they dined on prime ribs at the Petroleum Club where the faucets in the bathrooms were plated of gold, and where models glided softly about in gowns from French haute couture. They danced at the Shamrock, where a resident diamond merchant dropped by their table and pulled out a handful of brilliant gems and threw them at Joan like rolling dice. They dressed in togas and laurel leaves to attend a party of staggering cost where the guests imitated ancient Romans. They became regular patrons at a musical theater where the director offered Joan and John the leading roles in a revival of Guys and Dolls. Declining, Joan roared, “Honey, the only thing I can sing is ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ and people usually stick their fingers in their ears.” Over one autumn weekend, they attended eleven different parties and just before the sun rose on Monday, when John was due back at the hospital, they sat on a lonely beach at Galveston, her head in his lap, he playing the recorder while the sea washed their weary feet. They posed for photographs at a horse show cocktail party, and a gossip columnist reported, “Isn’t the new man in cosmopolite Joan Robinson’s busy life a fortunate young surgeon? It is, it is … and watch the other swains sob.”
In the beginning, Joan carefully avoided exposing her new find to Ash. But he knew. He had heard, in fact, of their very first encounter at the Cork Club, and he had made discreet inquiries about the boy before the week was out. And when his daughter began carefully mentioning a young doctor she enjoyed dating, Ash, for a change, was benign. On the evening that Joan brought John to her father’s home to ask permission to marry, the surgeon was well briefed what to expect. Pa will lay down five thousand reasons why the wedding should not
take place, Joan said. Just sit there and listen quietly, she warned. Then let her take over.
Mount Robinson did not erupt. Ash was charming, hospitable, and inquisitive. He asked about John Hill’s medical training and remarked on various doctors he knew and respected. He commented on what a wonderful profession doctoring could be. His own father had been a pioneer surgeon and for a time he himself had considered medicine. By the way, how much longer did John have in the educational process?
Six or seven years, he answered. Ash nodded sympathetically.
Did John Hill care anything about horses? Surely he knew that they were an integral part of this girl’s life.
No, said John. But he could learn. And whatever Joan liked to do, then he would share her passion.
Finally, did John Hill really love his daughter? She was the most precious possession in his life, and he could not relinquish her to any man if he was not secure in that.
More than that, said John Hill. He worshiped her.
“Then I guess Ma and me will have to fix us a wedding,” said Ash in a voice of butter, milk, and honey.
It must have occurred to Ash Robinson as he watched the happy couple drive away that the alliance was, on balance, one that he could live with. Joan was twenty-six years old and if she had to marry somebody, then John Hill was not the worst of choices, certainly more promising than Travers Fell. He was, after all, a surgeon-to-be, and Houston was a city that paid its social dues to surgeons. Ash had never really earned a position in real old guard society, even through his money, his ancestral blood, and his daughter’s fame. One of the town’s most exclusive clubs had rejected his application for membership, the suspicion being that his conviction for fraud, albeit reversed by the appellate court, made him too much a pirate. He snorted around at the time, saying he didn’t give a damn, but the fact that he made application in the first place showed clearly that, in his heart, he did.
Blood and Money Page 6