A Treasury of Doctor Stories

by Fabricant, Noah D. ; Werner, Heinz;

  Looking back on that winter, the only new development in my status as a cryptogenic was the appearance of flashes in the eyes, accompanied by gobbets of incandescent blue light, floating lazily across the field of vision and disappearing into the mystery from which they sprang.

  It was—and is—difficult to describe these symptoms. The flashing, or scintillance, has a resemblance to what you see in a broken neon sign. The flashes have a definite rhythm, somewhat slower, as near as I can measure them, than that of alternating electric current—about one hundred cycles, I should say, that is, fifty flickers a minute.

  My doctor could shed no light on these things. All he could say was that similar phenomena had been observed. He had no idea either as to its cause or cure. He murmured something about “electrical phenomena,” and let the subject drop.

  So I dropped it, too.

  Once established, the flashing never ceased, either by daylight or in the dark, with eyes open or eyes closed. And these pyrotechnical displays have been my inseparable companions ever since, slowly growing in intensity and magnitude.

  To get a rough idea of how life looks to a person with these “scintillating scotomas,” just imagine some sort of wire arrangement fixed on your forehead, so that bits of glass, blue, white, and black, dangle constantly in front of your eyes. On these bits of glass is fixed a bright light, so that they keep up a never ending sparkle. To complete the scene, you have an assistant stand to one side, shooting Roman candles across your field of view—bright blue balls, mostly, but now and then a “tracer” of fiery yellow. The sparkler show never stops, but the Roman candles are fired only when you least expect them. This adds a needed touch of variety to life with a “scintillating scotoma.” Without this it might be monotonous.

  I am not going to deny that these “electrical phenomena” have been a great nuisance. At times they have made me extremely jumpy. In weaker moments, I have called them “intolerable.” But that is a word altogether too loosely used. Anything can be tolerated. It is really amazing how much we can tolerate when we have to. It is amazing, too, how much of a margin we have been given in our senses. Providence has been especially generous in its allotment of vision. We can get along with much less than the normal equipment. Perfect sight is a pleasant thing to have, but it is by no means essential. When some is lost, it is possible to do quite well with what is left.

  Nature seems also to have provided us with a surplus of nervous resistance. Those “scintillating scotomas”—as they are called by people who have heard about them but never experienced them—are another proof. This incessant display of fireworks between you and the visible world is certainly vexing. It “drives you crazy.” But you find that you can forget it. You can forget it when you are busy with something that interests you, or when you are occupied with something that has to be done.

  I wonder why the human race has always been so obsessed with the idea of leisure. Man has always cherished the singularly perverse ideal of a workless world. He has managed to delude himself into thinking that work is a curse, when, obviously, it is the exact opposite of that.

  It is considered a pious platitude to say that work is a blessing; but in my opinion it is a platitude which cannot be repeated too often. I know that my worst moments are when I have nothing to do, and can devote my full attention to worry. And I wish to state, from long experience, that nobody puts in such long hours of concentrated effort as an accomplished worrier. A good worrier thinks nothing of worrying for sixteen hours at a stretch, and, with practice, one can even worry in one’s sleep.

  The Country Doctor

  IVAN BEEDE

  WHILE Dr. Moon waited for a telephone call from the Masheks’ it began to snow. A shadow fell across the book he was reading and slowly, slowly, the pale winter light thickened into obscurity. He raised his head to look out the window, then with an effort swung it around and glanced about the room. Although the electric switch was only a few feet away he felt too hopeless to move. Instead he let his head fall to one side in a gesture of fatigue, and closed his eyes.

  All this Sunday afternoon, alone in the house, he had been expecting the Mashek cail. Sooner or later it would come, and he would have to look at Lily Mashek’s deluded smile again. There was nothing more he could do for her, she was beyond aid, but just the same he would go. He felt obliged to go, because last night he had acted like a fool, on her account.

  With his head fallen limply, his body slumped in the chair, he waited helplessly for the call to come. He could think of nothing else. The case depressed him, with a depression which he could not shake off, which had been increasing for days.

  It was not Lily Mashek so much as the moment she had chosen to die. She had forced herself on his attention just after the long siege of influenza, which had left him physically exhausted, discouraged, and worried by new, strange doubts.

  During the epidemic he had been the only available doctor, the others being absent in the Army, and as usual he had taken his work too seriously. He had seemed an almost omnipresent figure in his big fur coat and hunter’s cap, his mild face masklike with fatigue. There was no distance he would not drive, no extra effort he would not make, but too many of his patients died. They died by the dozens, throughout the fall and these early months of winter.

  The growing toll of deaths threw him into a fit of black discouragement. He was certain that almost any other doctor would have been more useful. But what hurt him most, when he suffered from his own shortcomings so keenly, was to lose patients (and he lost many) who had no right to die. It was dreadful to see them give up without a struggle, killed by fear of the unknown, by lack of faith in themselves, by mental panic arising from the war. Some of them were men whom for years he had respected. He watched them go with tears of anger in his eyes. They were cowards, they did not deserve to live, yet he blamed himself because they died.

  When it was all over he was left in a state of mental depression induced by fatigue. He had not only temporarily lost confidence in himself, he was harassed by secret doubts, doubts which he thought too terrible to divulge, about the humanity he had always been so proud to serve. He knew what was wrong. He needed time to forget, to renew his hold on life, but at this moment Lily Mashek fell mortally ill.

  He had been her doctor for years, and the spectacle of her life had always annoyed him, but now it took on an exaggerated significance in his mind. She symbolized all the weakness, the fatuity, the shame, of the world he had just discovered. To go every day to that dismal house, to look at her silly smile, grew more and more unbearable, and several days before it seemed he had reached the limit of his patience.

  And then last night the nurse had called him up. Her name was Mrs. Thorpe, and she had come from Omaha to help with the influenza cases. He disliked her brisk, efficient ways and the professional manner of her speech. “I think she’s going, Moon. Will you come right over?”

  He was in bed, with the extension phone pulled to his side. The dry, sharp voice seemed slightly less metallic than the vibration of the receiver. “No, I will not come over,” he answered at once, with irrational rage. “I’m in bed. Do you think I’m going to get up and dress just to go over there? There’s nothing more I can do.”

  Mrs. Thorpe’s voice buzzed on. It was the reproving voice of humanity. He listened a second to the rasping in his ear, and then without a word slammed the receiver. He did not intend to get out of bed.

  But he did get up. He was lying with his hands over his stomach when his wife came in from her room. “What is it, Doctor? Is anything the matter?” “No,” he said, sick with discouragement, “nothing’s the matter.” He climbed out of bed, put on his clothes over his nightshirt, and concealing this makeshift under his coat of fur, went down to the speak-easy. After filling himself full of port he was able to come home and sleep.

  But this morning he felt conscience-stricken and made a call at the Masheks’. He found the nurse coldly superior, and Lily not dead after all. There was really no
thing to do, there had been nothing last night, but he told Mrs. Thorpe to keep in touch with him through the day. And now when the telephone rang he would go over there again, to no purpose.

  He stirred helplessly, and suddenly the book slid from his lap to the floor, pulling his hand with it. He sat there for a moment as he was, with one arm hanging loose, his mind like his body seeming scattered and formless.

  With an effort he pulled himself together, picked the book up from the floor, and walked to the window. His head whirled with vertigo, his ears rang, stars streaked across his eyelids. The dizziness passed, and then he looked through the snow at the lonely street lined with square wooden houses. The snow was dropping monotonously, straight from the sky, melting as fast as it fell. While he watched the flakes thickened, the gray deepened, and fringes of white formed on the bare spots of the lawn.

  The telephone rang. It was as he expected. Lily was worse again.

  He donned his overcoat and cap, discovered that he was still wearing slippers, changed to his shoes, and closed the door of the house.

  The snow fell on him in a steady, unending rhythm, on his cap, his shoulders, his nose. He could only see two hundred feet ahead, there were no lights in the houses, the town seemed deserted, tenantless. He walked along a lane of bare trees, through the snow, toward the twilight, alone. He had never felt so alone, and because of his depression his thoughts took on the complexion of the day. He saw the whole world living in these frail, sad houses, in the midst of desolation; victims of the weather, of vague fears, and senseless delusions. It weighed heavily on his spirit. If mankind did not have dignity, how could he hold up his own head? Besides, the humanity to which he ministered with his beautiful hands, had to have dignity.

  And Lily Mashek! It was as if she had been unconscious all her life, and she really had that air about her. She was always running from one delusion to another, never touching reality. When Joe took to drink and began to beat her, she turned prohibitionist and tried to save his soul. All these years she had borne up with him, while her expression grew more angelic. And the reason was not because she loved Joe, but because people praised her fortitude, and called her a saint.

  And now . . . now she was dying with a happy smile on her face because Joe had promised never to drink again. Joe reform! In a month he would be drunk, in six months he would be beating up some other woman. It was maddening.

  The Mashek house was on the east edge of town, near the ice pond. Years ago it had been painted pink but now it loomed through the snow a kind of livid gray, sitting abjectly on a little rise of ground, a tall narrow house on a high foundation, looking both obscene and startled in the abandoned yard. He went up the path—there was no walk—and stamped the wet snow from his shoes on the porch.

  A strange young man answered the door. There was no lamp inside, and he could not make out who it was. Then he recognized the Mashek boy, who must have arrived since the morning. While the son was pumping his hand, Dr. Moon remembered him unpleasantly. As a boy he had fought with Joe on the streets, and later had run away.

  Going to the stairs he discovered Joe sitting by the table, with his head in his arms. The old man straightened up as he passed.

  “It’s no good, Doc. She’s going to die.”

  “We’ll see, Joe.”

  “Come on, Joe,” he heard the son say from the dimness, “don’t bother Doc. You know what’s going to happen as well as he does.”

  Dr. Moon went up the stairs to the sickroom. As soon as he opened the door Mrs. Thorpe hurried on tiptoe toward him. She lifted the sick chart from the bedstand and handed it to him.

  She jarred on his nerves.

  “Give her some air,” he said. “You don’t want to choke her, do you?”

  He put down the chart without looking at it and approached the iron bedstead. On the stand alongside was a coal oil lamp with a bright pink shade, some ancient peace offering of Joe’s. The patient lay beyond the circle of light, in the blue shadows.

  She was very thin and wasted, but her eyes were abnormally bright, and there was a strange feverish precocity about the upturned nose and a misplaced look of eagerness on her face. Although she lay weak and still, she seemed in perpetual movement, and at sight of him her lips opened in an ecstatic smile. All he could see was that smile, which maddened and saddened him, and made him want to hurt her even now. Yet when he spoke his voice was very gentle.

  “How are you, Lily?”

  He felt her pulse, placed his cool palm a moment on her forehead, then arranged her arms more comfortably, and turning to the nurse, signed with his hands that there was nothing more he could do. . . . He walked to the window and raised the sash, which she had lifted a little way, as high as it would go. A draught of damp air came in and brought to his ears the cottony sound of falling snow. The ice pond was all but invisible, limited at one end by the crazy-scattered limbs of scrubwillows, rising like giant witches’ brooms, and at the other by the shadowy outlines of the ice house.

  A thought was struggling in his mind, but he could not hold it. He could feel it, however, in successive waves, a tremendous affront to him, to everybody who held life in esteem.

  The sound of guns brought him back to himself, and then he heard the quick, scared call of ducks. Some one was hunting, he wondered who. It was almost completely dark; they would never find the birds, even if they got them. It worried him. And then he wished he were out there too, in warm high boots, lying in the snow behind a blind of cornstalks, the firm feel of a gun in his hands.

  He pulled the window half-way down and started to leave. Mrs. Thorpe cut across to meet him, always on tiptoe, always with her swinging gait. There was something hard and metallic about her, with her bronze hair and sharp features and starched uniform. She awaited him with her hand on the door.

  “How long will it be, Moon?”

  “Moon, Moon,” he thought. What a brittle cat she was.

  “How do I know?” he demanded. And then, curtly, “A couple of hours, maybe four.”

  Mrs. Thorpe nodded, looked speculatively down at the floor, and made a little clucking sound.

  He stared at her, then brushed his arm vaguely across his face. She looked so pleased. She was like impersonal nature, which seems to enjoy the manifestation of its phenomena. The expression on her face was just the same as that which he felt in the sun, the trees, the skyline, whenever he left a bed of death.

  At the foot of the stairs he saw the son turn from the window, saw him because of the faint blue light which appeared as he moved away. At the same time he felt across the room the full impress of his cheerful bulk on the air.

  “Pardon me, Doc, I want to ask you something. Will it be all right to take Joe out for a walk? Just for a little while. He hasn’t budged since I come. He’s in an awful state.”

  The son seemed determined to make the best of things. His manner and his personality irritated Dr. Moon. Besides, he could hear behind him Joe milling in a chair, and his stomach was revolted by the cold, stale smell of the house: a sickening egg-shell odour. He longed to get out, but forced himself to be courteous. He went to great lengths.

  “It will be all right,” he said, “if you don’t stay too long, and keep in touch with the house. Nothing will happen right away. It never does.” He straightened, and put an arm in his overcoat. “You see, these shocks never come close together, even at the last. A crisis arrives because the heart can’t pump blood through the arteries. The condition is accompanied by spasms of pain—your mother has been suffering the past week. We do what we can to ease her with narcotics . . . morphine. Then the condition clears . . . the heart triumphs, so to speak . . . and things go along for a while. Always for a while. . . .”

  “I see,” the son said. “I see.”

  Dr. Moon turned toward the table, touching his hat to the obscurity. “Good-bye, Joe.”

  “Good-bye, Doc. Oh, Doc! Good-bye!”

  He closed the door. A slight draught blew curling flakes about his t
rouser legs, his feet sounded hollow on the porch. He slushed through the snow, already melting on the sidewalk, clinging to his steps, making his feet seem heavy. The smell of the house, the sound of the son’s voice, the picture of his patient in that upstairs room, were still with him: he could not shake them off. Lily was going to die, she was going to die as she had lived, deluded. And the snow was falling endlessly, foreshortening the darkness, covering the earth and the houses, imprisoning him with his thoughts.

  At the corner of the square he hesitated, standing with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched under the smothering shower. It was completely night, a blackness thickened with gray. The other side of the feebly lighted square looked like the edge of civilization. Beyond, it seemed there could be nothing human, only a limitless waste of falling snow.

  Such a wave of hopelessness came over him that he could not think of going home, and he turned toward the speak-easy. He wanted to get drunk, drunker than he had ever been in his life, drunker than he had ever dreamed of being, so drunk that he could fall into a thoughtless sleep.

  He walked along the square, which was almost entirely deserted, and into a side street. The speak-easy, a former grocery store in which a full bar equipment had been installed, was packed with men. He edged up to a vacant place half-way down the long rail and ordered a rye, tossing it off at a swallow. Then he ordered another one.

  He faced the entrance, lifting his glass, and as he did so the door opened and old Joe appeared, pushed in by his son.

  The glass was at his lips; he drank the whisky and turned to the bar again, watching the approach of father and son in the mirror. They were quite close before they saw him. The son greeted him heartily and passed on, but Joe started, then sank his head more deeply into his shoulders.