A Treasury of Doctor Stories

by Fabricant, Noah D. ; Werner, Heinz;

  As soon as the lawyer caught sight of it he was exhilarated with its beauty.

  “What a wonderful work of art!” he laughed uproariously. “Ye gods, what conceptions artists will get in their heads! What alluring charm! Where did you get this little dandy?”

  But now his exhilaration had oozed away and he became frightened. Looking stealthily toward the door, he said:

  “But, I can’t accept it, old chap. You must take it right back.”

  “Why?” asked the doctor in alarm..

  “Because . . . because . . . my mother often visits me, my clients come here . . . and besides, I would be disgraced even in the eyes of my servants.”

  “Don’t say another word!” cried the doctor gesticulating wildly. “You simply have got to accept it! It would be rank ingratitude for you to refuse it! Such a masterpiece! What motion, what expression. . . . You will greatly offend me if you don’t take it!”

  “If only this were daubed over or covered with fig leaves. . ..”

  But the doctor refused to listen to him. Gesticulating even more wildly, he ran out of Ukhov’s house in the thought that he was rid of the present.

  When the doctor was gone the lawyer carefully examined the candelabrum, and then, just as the doctor had done, he began to wonder what in the world he could do with it.

  “A very beautiful object,” he thought. “It is a pity to throw it away, and yet it is disgraceful to keep it. I had best present it to someone . . . I’ve got it! . . . This very evening I’m going to give it to the comedian Shoshkin. The rascal loves such things, and besides, this is his benefit night. . . .”

  No sooner thought than done. That afternoon the well-packed candelabrum was brought to the comedian Shoshkin.

  That whole evening the dressing-room of the comedian Shoshkin was besieged by men who hastened to inspect the present. And during all the time the room re-echoed with hilarious laughter which most closely resembled the neighing of horses.

  If any of the actresses approached the door and said, “May I enter?” the hoarse voice of Shoshkin was immediately heard to reply:

  “Oh, no, no, my darling, you mustn’t. I am not dressed!” After the performance the comedian shrugged his shoulders, gesticulated with his hands and said:

  “Now what in the world am I to do with this? I live in a private apartment! I am often visited by actresses! And this isn’t a photograph that one could conceal in a drawer!”

  “Why don’t you sell it?” suggested the wig maker. “There is a certain old woman who buys up antique bronzes. . .. Her name is Smirnova. . . . You had better take a run over there; they’ll show you the place all right, everybody knows her. . ..”

  The comedian followed his advice. . ..

  Two days later Koshelkov, his head supported on his hand, was sitting in his office concocting pills. Suddenly the door was opened and into the office rushed Sasha. He was smiling radiantly and his breast heaved with joy. . . . In his hands he held something wrapped in a newspaper.

  “Doctor!” he cried breathlessly. “Imagine my joy! As luck would have it, I’ve just succeeded in getting the mate to your candelabrum! Mother is so happy! I am the only son of my mother. . .. You have saved my life.”

  And Sasha, quivering with thankfulness and rapture, placed a candelabrum before the doctor. The latter opened his mouth as if to say something, but uttered not a word. . .. His power of speech was gone. . ..

  Who Lived and Died Believing

  NANCY HALE

  IT WAS a strange, hot summer. The days throbbed and the nights were exhausted and melancholy. In August the temperature rose over ninety and hung there; the heat shimmered over the buildings and the streets of the town. Every afternoon at two Elizabeth Percy came down the steps of the house that was made into apartments for nurses. She walked along the burning pavements, around the corner, past the newsstand where the magazines hung fluttering on lines of wire, to Massey’s Drugstore.

  Her hair was very dark and as smooth as dark brown satin; it was combed back from her calm forehead and fell curving under at the back behind her ears. She wore plain uniforms with small round collars close about her neck, and she was all white and fresh and slender and strong.

  From the heat outside she would walk into the dim coolness of the drugstore that smelled of soda and candy. There was a faint sweat upon the marble of the soda fountain; Mr. Massey and the other clerks stood about in their light tan linen coats, and they smiled at her without speaking. Dave was behind the prescription counter wrapping up a small package; first the white paper and then slowly the thin bright red string. He lifted his head as she walked down the center of the store to where the tables were and his eyes met Elizabeth’s. She sat down at the small black table and one of the boys from the fountain came and took her order of Coca-Cola. Several electric fans whirred remotely, high on the ceiling. The door opened again at the front, and three internes from the hospital came in. They leaned together on the marble counter in their whites. Their faces were young and pale with heat.

  Dave came around the corner of the counter, and sat down beside Elizabeth. Mr. Massey walked slowly up toward the front of the store; he smiled absently at them; he always smiled at them as they sat together between two and three.

  They never talked much. Elizabeth sucked the drink slowly through a straw, and lifted the glass and let bits of crushed ice drop into her mouth; they melted on her tongue. She loved to look at Dave. He was very thin and tall and he had straight yellow hair that fell forward in a lock on his forehead. His eyes were restless. He would glance at her suddenly and smile.

  “How you doing over there?”

  “She’s just the same.”

  “Long case.”

  “Unh-hunh. Going to be longer.”

  “Tough you have to nurse one of those cases. Beckwith have any idea how long it’ll be?”

  One afternoon Elizabeth said, “Grainger told me yesterday he said he was going to use shock. Maybe.”

  “Insulin?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Dave raised his eyebrows and shook his head. The damp yellow lock trembled against his forehead. He had finished the second year of medical school and was working at Massey’s during the summer months.

  “Oh-oh. That won’t be so good.”

  “Grainger’ll have it, in the mornings.”

  “No, no fun,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry for Mrs. Myles.”

  Dave shrugged his shoulders.

  “Don’t get tough,” she said. “You’re not a doctor yet. Beckwith’s sorry for her, too. It’s not the usual thing. She’s gone through plenty.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Oh, real doctors have pity, you know; it’s just you little boys.”

  She smiled at him, and he smiled back after a minute. He looked restless and impatient. He reached one hand under the table and put it on her knee, and looked into her long, calm, dark blue eyes.

  “Meet you at eleven?” he said. Elizabeth nodded. He took his hand away.

  “She wants to see you again.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It doesn’t hurt you any. Just go up there to her room for a minute and say good night. She gets so much out of it.”

  He gave a sort of groan, and shifted in his chair.

  “She’s got those damned eyes. I don’t mean anything, I don’t like her looking like that.”

  “It’s just because we’re going together,” Elizabeth said. “It’s the only thing outside herself, you see, like the only thing that’s outside and ahead, and she likes to think about our going together.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “She asks me about you every day. Lots of times. I don’t know whether she forgets she’s asked before or whether . . . Come on, do it again once. It doesn’t hurt you.”

  “All right. All right. Eleven.”

  “Eleven.”

  She got up and walked to the counter and laid the check down with a nickel. She went out i
nto the heat, crossed the street, and walked up the wide steps of the hospital entrance.

  In Copperthwaite Two the corridor was dim and hot. Elizabeth stopped at the desk and turned over the leaves of the order book. Doctor Beckwith had ordered the shock treatment for the morning; no breakfast. Elizabeth drew in her breath. Miss Grainger came out of the door of 53 and down the hall, without her cap.

  “Hi,” Elizabeth said.

  “Hi.”

  “See you’ve got it ordered for tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “Does she know about it?”

  “I’m not sure. He came up and went over her this morning, heart and all, before we went out. Told her, but not exactly; said they were going to give her a treatment and there’d be acute physical discomfort. I love Doctor Beckwith. Discomfort. I don’t look forward to it, I tell you. Seems like there’s some things you don’t get used to, and I don’t like Shock.”

  “What have you all done?”

  “About the same. Walked. This walking miles in this weather does me in. I’m going home and go to sleep.”

  Elizabeth flipped back the pages of the order book.

  “What is this stuff, anyhow? We didn’t have it, then.”

  “Oh . . . camphor derivative? . . . something. Reckon I’ll know plenty in the morning. How’s Dave?”

  “Fine,” Elizabeth said. They parted and went along the long corridor in opposite directions. Elizabeth pushed open the heavy door of 53.

  Mrs. Myles sat beside the open window and in the vicious heat observed passing back and forth outside (along the pavement?) back and forth from hell the doughy and grimacing faces of the damned. And a little part of the rotted grapes that rolled about within her brain watched the faces with an abstracted care; each of the faces was forever familiar, a face seen before (where?), seen before and seen again, and where, where had been the face before? In her brain the fruit gave out a stench that she could taste in her mouth, and with it came the horror; no, no, those faces she had never seen before; it only seemed that she had; and the seeming was wrong and she could not send it away, the seeming stayed, shaking its tattered locks and grinning; yes, these faces had been seen before. The faces passed, and none of them was his. Watch, watch, observe with shrinking but insistent care each hideous face that comes nearer and nearer with death in its eyes and the unbelievable humanity, the bigness, in the coming-nearer mouths, until each face passed and was not his, was never his.

  Her heart that was no longer her friend beat frantically one two three four five six seven eight eighty is a normal pulse for a woman seventy for a man but this was—hundred and forty . . . MAD

  The heavy-strained tension split with the scream of silk. The door opened and Miss Percy came in. So cool so calm so bright. With calm brow, with dark hair, and eyes like dark blue water. Cool as the little leaves that tremble in the tree. What thou among the leaves hast never known. This she has never known, with her calm eyes. Oh reach to me, thou among the leaves, reach down to me in hell with your cool hands, reach down to me.

  She sees it all clean. The same world, clean. It is just me. I must remember that, it is just me; the world is cool and calm and bright. Not this. It is just me. Not mad, he said, just an exaggeration of your understandable state of tension, just an exaggeration of a normal point of view, just an exaggeration but not mad.

  “Poor old Mr. Duggan next door’s making quite a lot of noise,” Miss Percy said, smiling. She stood before the mirror of the yellow-oak bureau and took her cap from the bureau post and pinned it to the back of her dark head. “I hope it doesn’t bother you too much. Anyway, we’ll go right out.”

  “Poor Mr. Duggan,” Mrs. Myles said. “Is he getting any better at all?”

  “I think they’re going to give him some treatments that will make him all well.”

  The nurse glanced quickly at the patient.

  She didn’t mean to say that. She doesn’t know if I know it, too. They are coming.

  “You’d better wear your wide hat,” Miss Percy said. “The sun’s real hot this afternoon.”

  Obediently she put the hat upon her head and tied the ribbons that held it on under her chin.

  “Put a little lipstick on,” the nurse said. “It’s so becoming to you to have a little color in your lips. Don’t you remember what Doctor Beck-with said when he met us outside the steps yesterday, how pretty you looked? You’ve put on a pound and a half in two weeks. It won’t be long before we have you weighing what you ought to. Before you know it you’re going to be right strong.”

  Now to smile. Now widen the corners of the mouth and look straight into Miss Percy’s eyes and hold it for a moment. But no! This is no smile. This is the terrible and tragic shape of a comic mask. Thus grimace the damned, who burn in the fires, and looking upward to the cool hand that is stretched in kindness and impotence to meet their torment, try one last time and achieve the horrible stretch, the grin, of the comic mask.

  They walked down the hot dim corridor and turned to the right.

  “Can’t we please go down in the elevator?” Mrs. Myles said.

  Miss Percy’s face looked troubled.

  “I know,” she said. “Only he wants you to walk through the hospital.”

  “All right.”

  So once again. Endure, endure. Endure to the end.

  First they walked through the children’s ward. Once it had not been bad; the universal slime had not had time to foul this too; she had seen them as children, delicate and pale and sweet. But then the tide of the slime had mounted here too, and ever since it had been this way. Student nurses, nurses, internes passed them. “Afternoon, Mrs. Myles.” They all know me. Can they see it in my face? . . . In the little beds the children lay or sat, with their sick faces. Sickness was everywhere. This is the great house of sickness. The children’s faces were greenish with the heat. Which among them is mine? He is dead. He is not dead; which among them is mine, not well and laughing, but sick, which among them is my sick, corrupted child, infected from me all its tiny beginnings with the worm of sick sick sick? I am sick and all of mine is sick.

  And she smelled the sharp recurrent fear. Fear, that clawed at the ruin of her mind; fear that rattled in her chest about the flabby palpitating boundaries of her heart. This fear is wicked, she thought: I am not afraid for the children, I am afraid of them. I am afraid of everything. I am full of poison of wickedness and fear; cold poison.

  “He wants you to face things,” Miss Percy said as they passed through and beyond the men’s ward. “You know. Not get so you think you couldn’t do something, special.”

  “I k now.”

  In the beds the men lay, with sickness floating in the pools of their eyes. They passed on through the women’s ward. A woman looked up. One side of her face was swollen out to huge proportions, and covered with bandages through which leaked sticky, yellow stuff. There was the long ominous smell of sweet ether and they passed suddenly across the hall of the hospital and their feet sounded sharp and loud on the stone flagging, and they went out into the loud sad heat. They descended the steps and started to walk down the road away from the town.

  Suddenly from behind in the sunshine blared a loud-speaker, carried on a truck painted silver, with huge letters advertising an air-cooled movie house downtown. Slowly, slowly, the truck crept along the hot street. The enormous screaming music shook the atmosphere:

  “Fall in love, fall in love, says my heart . . .

  Fall in love, FALL IN LOVE .. .”

  It swung slowly around a corner out of sight. From far away in the afternoon the idiot voice still screamed:

  “Fall in love, fall in love, says my heart . . .”

  They walked steadily on, the nurse with a secret little smile; the woman, with a stiff and empty face.

  The hours passed in gross and threatening procession. And with the hours the woman felt the always coming on, the rising walls, of the enclosing fear, like sound-proof glass, shutting her away; the terrible
pawlike hand fumbling with the cork to stopper her finally into this bottle of aloneness.

  She sat beside the window in the decline of the afternoon, and her hand was too sick with fear to stretch out to the shade and pull it down against the sun. She did not dare to move her hand. And soon the sun had bobbled behind the dreadful mountains of the west.

  The nurse spoke to her several times and at last in her closing bottle she heard the voice from far away and turned and it was supper being put before her on a tray. In the bowls of all the spoons were faces, that grinned at her and twisted their mouths into screams.

  She ate, and then she was sick and the good food left her body in protest and she sat again by the window where the evening light now ran in around the edges of the shade like liquid poison, wet and lying on the floor and on the furniture of the room. The nurse put a table before her and laid out cards for a game upon its surface.

  She looked down and saw the ferret faces of the kings and queens, the knaves; pinched and animal-like faces that whispered until the whispering was like a whistling in the room; and she turned her face away, but there was only the faraway flapping shade with the night running in around the edges, and she looked again at her hands but they were vast and swollen and she turned away and closed her eyes but within her was nothing but fear.

  “How do you feel?” the nurse said in the evening room.

  “How do you feel?” the nurse said.

  “How do you feel?” the nurse said.

  “HOW DO YOU FEEL?” the nurse said.

  The nurse said, “Mrs. Myles, is there anything the matter?”

  “It’s as if,” she said, “all the human things had been taken out of me and it left holes, like a cheese with great empty holes. And the holes have to be filled with something and they are all filled up with fear. So that where I had all sorts of things now I haven’t got anything but fear in all the holes.”

  But that wasn’t it at all, not only that ; there was the bottle, how to tell someone of the bottle, glass, and sound-proof, where the stopper was being pushed tight home with her inside; not like a moth, no, not so clean, not like the souls in bottles, animula, vagula, blandula. No, like a festering purple lump of tissue.