“You here too, Doc?” he asked huskily.
Dr. Moon did not speak, he only nodded, and faced the mirror again, fingering his glass. He watched in amazement while Joe sat down at a table and the son brought sandwiches, bologna and beer. He felt be-wildered, a little hurt, as if they had done him some wrong, and then suddenly, in keeping with his state of mind, with the gloomy weather, with everything that had gone before, an intuition came to him. He was positive the son knew nothing of Joe’s promise to reform, because Joe lacked the strength to tell him. Now that they were here it was easy to see what would happen. They would both get drunk and go stumbling home, where Lily was dying in the belief that Joe would never drink again.
It all came to him in a flash, and he was sure, absolutely sure, that he had guessed the truth. It was just such a thing as would happen to the Masheks, as would happen to him, on such a night, feeling as he did.
His conscience bothered him, urging him to interfere, but he pushed it down violently. It was none of his affair.
He waited for developments with flushed cheeks and pounding heart. Everything occurred as he had foreseen: it was like the working out of a play whose action he had guessed. Soon after they had finished eating the son came to the bar for two whiskies. A little later he returned for two more.
Dr. Moon gripped the rail tightly and ordered another one himself.
There was no question now that he was right, that he had been right all along in his shame of humanity. Humanity! The blood rushed to his brain and he saw a whole world of foolish Lilies and weak Joes and well-meaning sons, a world which filled him with disgust.
He wanted to laugh, he wanted to do more than laugh. And then he had an amusing idea, the idea of joining them, to see what would happen.
Taking his glass in his hand, he walked as steadily as he could down the center of the room and stood at their side.
Old Joe started to get up deferentially, but Dr. Moon waved him back to his seat.
“I thought I’d come,” he said, with a self-conscious bow, “and join the performance. Since we’re all here together.”
“Good for you, Doc,” the son said. “Sit down and have a drink and listen to what I been saying to Joe. I know you’ll agree with me absolutely. We’re both in the same boat, I told him. I know it hits him hardest, you can’t deny that, but there’s only one thing to do. No matter who we are we got to take these things as they come. Ain’t I right, Doc?”
Dr. Moon nodded his head gravely. “I’m coming to believe so,” he said. “I do agree with you, absolutely. It’s a mistake to take things too hard.”
Joe looked at him, unimpressed. Slowly he shook his head. “I been a bad man, Doc. I been a drunken, good-for-nothing son of a bitch. But I’m gone to reform. Doc don’t believe me, he knows something, Doc does. But I’m gone to, wait and see. You think so, Doc? Listen, Doc. There’s things I got to do. I got to have a mass said, and a monument. . ..”
“You can’t do that,” the son interrupted. “I wish you’d explain to him, Doc. Ma’s a Baptist. You can’t have no mass said for a Baptist.”
“Although I’m not a Catholic,” said Dr. Moon, “I’ll tell you this : the Catholic church is a great church.” He put out his hands, explanatory. “Catholic—universal. Universal—Catholic. . . . I’m not familiar with the laws of the church, but I’m sure that it’s possible. You go ahead, Joe, and do what you want.” He turned to the son. “Joe will do what he wants.”
“He sure will,” the son said, “and I’ll help him. Don’t you ever doubt that. You ask him what the first thing I said to him was. ‘I was a mean kid,’ I said, ‘and I want to make up for it now. Anything in the world I can do let me know, and,’ I said, ’take it from me I didn’t come broke.’ Don’t you worry about the monument, Joe.”
“As for the stone . . .” began Dr. Moon and paused. “I wonder . . . I’d like . ..” He hesitated again, while Joe looked at him with a wavering glance. “Lily. All these years. You know what I’m trying to say . . . I never sent you a bill in my life, Joe. If you’d let me help a little now . . .”
Joe began suddenly to weep. His little red watery eyes looked like broken blisters. “You too, Doc,” he said. “You like Lily. She’s so good, and me . . . Do you know what I am, Doc? I’m . . .”
Dr. Moon put his hand on Joe’s shoulder, which collapsed under his touch. “Yes, I know, Joe, but don’t worry now. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. We’re no good. Nobody’s any good. Hell. Look, Joe—” he brought his hand back and put it to his side, as if expecting to find something wrong. “Some day, Joe, you and I . . .”
“Sure, we all got it coming to us,” the son said. “Let’s have another drink.” He got up and went to the bar.
Dr. Moon watched his retreating back, and then said confidentially : “These young fellows, Joe. They don’t understand, as we do. Every time the sun sets it’s one less for us, and we wonder why it should be that way when we know what’s at the end; nothing. I beg your pardon, Joe. I know you don’t believe that, but . . . nothing.”
He waited for the son to return, and went on: “You’re right, we all have it coming to us. That’s just the point I want to make. We’ve got to remember that every day. Here we are, you and Joe and I. We’ve got to live. We can’t die without living. We’ve got to be conscious, be human, live strenuously, live beautifully. Live. We’ve got to mean something. There is a saying” (he waited to fix their attention) : “Be noble, and the nobleness of other men . . . sleeping but not dead . . . will rise in majesty, to meet thine own.”
“ ‘Will rise in majesty, to meet thine own,’ ” the son repeated. “That’s beautiful, Doc. That’s swell.”
“Lily,” Joe called. “She’s like what you say, ain’t she, Doc?”
Dr. Moon suddenly came to himself, and did not say any more. He remembered his idea and became very reserved, nodding his head and drinking in silence while both Joe and the son talked at once.
The talking stopped, and all three grew aware that the bartender was standing before them.
“Somebody telephoned from your house,” he said to Joe. “They want you to come home.”
They looked with scared glances at Dr. Moon and then at one another.
“Come,” the doctor said. “We’d better hurry.”
He pulled Joe up from the chair and the son helped with the overcoat. They left by the rear door, which opened on an alley, and followed it to the street. They walked one on each side of Joe, pulling him along, holding him up when he wanted to drop to his knees and pray. The weather had grown colder, ice had formed under the deepening layer of snow. It was difficult going. A wind blew small, hard flakes across their faces.
Dr. Moon felt intensely curious, but calm. Several times his conscience intruded, but he ignored it. He was only a spectator. He was going to find out the end of the play.
The son leaned over Joe’s back and whispered: “Do you think we’ll be too late, Doc?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Dr. Moon answered. “Not if we hurry.”
He was the first to enter the house. A lamp had been placed below by the light of which he saw the nurse looking down from the top of the stairs. He took off his wraps and mounted, followed by Joe and the son. His step was steady; he felt perfectly sober. He walked across the sickroom to the little corner washstand and scrubbed his hands and dried them skillfully on a towel. It was all mechanical, almost unconscious. Then he turned to his patient.
Her eyes stared at the ceiling, her lips moved, her hands crawled back and forth over the covers.
“What is it, Lily?” he asked, and motioned to the nurse to find out what she was saying.
“She wants you to come close,” Mrs. Thorpe told Joe and the son.
They leaned awkwardly over the bed and she stared at them, and then smiled in exaltation. Dr. Moon watched the smile, and the troubled but unbroken rhythm of her lips as she prayed. Then he turned away. He had known at once that she could not see them, that s
he could only realise their presence. She was dying deluded after all.
He walked to the window, watching the white flakes whirl in from the blackness and click against the pane. Behind him he heard Lily’s dry, persistent whispering, and an occasional moan from Joe.
So now he knew for sure there was no sense in anything.
He turned around. “I’m going, Joe. I’m going. Good-bye.”
He walked quickly from the room, signalling for the nurse to follow him, closing the door behind them. For a second he stared at her, then brushed his hand across his face. Already he felt tired again.
“Do you want to do something for me? Two things. Go downstairs and cook them something hot, some coffee. And the second thing: stay out of there.”
She stood still, making no answer, watching him in amazement. At the top of the stairs he turned and looked over his shoulder. “Whatever you do,” he added, “don’t you touch her.”
He descended with eyes looking straight ahead, put on his coat, his cap, his gloves, marched out of the house, across the yard, down the street, through the snow. It was getting bitter; he turned up the collar of his coat and sunk his hands deep in the pockets. He tried not to think : above everything else, he tried not to think of what he had done.
To-morrow, he told himself, would be another day. He would be all right to-morrow.
Morton
LOUISE FIELD COOPER
EARLY one Saturday morning a while back I went into the hospital and had a baby named Peter. This was no surprise to anyone, and shortly afterward I lapsed into a complacent doze. When I woke, hours later, there was a man in the room. He was a stranger, a thin-faced man in white, pushing a long red handle that had a wide black brush shaped like Groucho Marx’s mustache on the end of it. He was watching me as he maneuvered slowly around the foot of the bed toward the waste-basket.
“Good morning,” I said, feeling superbly cozy and affable.
“It is a good morning,” he agreed. “Too good to have to stay in here.”
“I can’t complain,” I said in a brave-little-woman voice.
“I meant me,” he said.
His name was Morton and I got to know him well. Certainly I saw a lot more of him than of any other man. Peter made only occasional, very brief visits to my room, and my husband and the doctor were in and eat, but in an irresponsible sort of way, so Morton was about all I could depend on for really steady masculine companionship. The second day, he came in during my breakfast. “Read the paper today?” was his greeting, accompanied by a mournful bending of the head and a sigh.
“No, tell me,” I urged politely.
“Well”—he made a few perfunctory swipes with his brush, and then came to rest leaning on the handle—“There’s a little item I noticed says a lady away out in Idaho is slowly, slowly dyin’ of an unknown disease. Baffles science, the paper says. Terrible, ain’t it?”
My appetite for coffee and toast and marmalade faded. “What’s the matter with her?” I asked.
“Seems she’s shrinkin’. Nobody knows why. This Spring she was as all right as you or me. Come July, she begun to shrink.” We pondered this interesting case for several silent minutes. Then he fell to work. “Ah, well,” he said.
After this little chat he did a brisk, thorough job of sweeping out my room and departed rather happy.
Being so much with Morton colored my point of view. He came in first every day during breakfast, and often he dropped in around noon-time to see if the wastebasket needed emptying and how I was doing, and he always did another bit of tidying early in the evening. It was in the evening that he wielded his greatest power over me.
“Any visitors today?” he would ask, gazing downward, sweeping slowly.
“Oh, it’s too soon for me to have visitors,” I would say. “I’m not supposed to have any until the baby’s a week old.” But as Peter rapidly approached his second Saturday on earth, I began to feel neglected. The evening of the day Peter was eight days old, Morton neatly corralled the dust into a circle and leaned on his brush. “Any visitors today?” he murmured.
“Well, no. Not any today. The doctor came, and my husband, of course, but no visitors. Maybe tomorrow.”
Next day I put on my best nightgown and enamelled my fingernails. The flowers around the room were very fresh and fragrant; beyond the hospital windows a warm rain sped to the pavement. I waited for visitors for a while, and then I read magazines, turning the pages frequently, one eye on the door. No one came to see me; steps passed and passed to other rooms, but only the nurse ever turned in at my door.
At suppertime Morton was at my side, looking at me.
“It rained terribly hard all afternoon,” I said quickly. “Nobody would want to go outdoors to visit at a hospital a day like today.”
Morton shook his head and said nothing.
The next afternoon I never took my eyes off the door. No one came to visit me, and by night I had worked up a degree and a half of temperature. “Keep her quiet all tomorrow,” the doctor said. “And no visitors.” Next day was heavenly. I hummed to myself all day, carefree as a flower. Any number of my friends came to the door and were turned away. I told Morton about it at suppertime.
“Of course, I’m frightfully disappointed not to have seen them,” I said, gaily tossing a butterball into my baked potato. Morton said, “Ah, well.”
It wasn’t until I had been about a week at the hospital that I had any clue to the reason for Morton’s rather special point of view on life. He brought in the Sunday paper.
“How are you today?” I asked.
“Pretty fair for a Tuesday.”
“Tuesday? Today’s Sunday.”
“It’s Tuesday for me. Friday’s my day off, so I call it my Sunday, see? That makes Saturday my Monday. Today’s Tuesday. That’s the way I live—twisted, you might say. I was going to take a little motor trip my Sunday, but it rained all day.”
“You’re fond of driving?”
“Been driving ever since before they made you get a license. Those days, all you had to do was go before the police chief and he give you a piece paper said on it ’This man is illegible to drive a non-horse-drawn vehicle.’”
“That must have made you very proud.”
“Naturally it did.” He swept beneath the bed. “I like cars. One of the few things I do like, you might say. Bought me a motorcycle once, but the first time I was on it I hit a stone in the middle of the road and when I come to I was up in the crotch of a tree, danglin’ like. I’ve drove a car ever since. Four wheels is none too many.”
No one who hasn’t had a baby on the third floor of the Private Pavilion can ever know how subtle and how penetrating Morton’s influence was. Some of my customary lightheartedness, I think, has seeped permanently away. The morning before I went home, I looked up from excavating a boiled egg to find him standing at the foot of the bed.
“Seen the papers?”
“Yes!” I cried. I thought I’d beat him to it for once. “I loved the triple slaying in Mississippi.”
But he shook his head. “Not that.” He moved a little nearer. “I mean the woman in Topeka who’s had just one twin.”
“What?”
“Yeh.” He turned his enormous black eyes from my face and stared out the window. “Just the one. That was last week sometime. The other one, she’s still waiting for it. Horrible, wouldn’t you say?”
“But why don’t the doctors help her have the other?”
Morton drifted to the door, his eyes resting ever so lightly on my helpless, extended form. “Doctors?” he said. “Well . . .” He tipped his head sideways with what might be some fearful secret knowledge and followed his long-handled brush into the hall. I lay clamped in a cold apprehension. What if little Peter, asleep in the hospital nursery, was only half of what Nature had contrived for me. Perhaps my doctor . . . I rang and rang and rang for the nurse, and it was an eternity before I heard her firm footsteps coming along the hall and the soothing rustle of her starc
hed white skirt as she turned in at my door.
The Medicine Man
ERSKINE CALDWELL
THERE was nobody in Rawley who believed that Effic Henderson would ever find a man to marry her, and Effie herself had just about given up hope. But that was before the traveling herb doctor came to town.
Professor Eaton was a tall gaunt-looking man with permanent, sewn-in creases in his trousers and a high celluloid collar around his neck. He may have been ten years older than Effie, or he may have been ten years younger; it was no more easy to judge his age than it was to determine from what section of the country he had originally come.
He drove into Rawley one hot dusty morning in mid-August, selling Indian Root Tonic. Indian Root Tonic was a beady, licorice-tasting cure-all in a fancy green-blown bottle. The bottle was wrapped in a black and white label, on which the most prominent feature was the photographic reproduction of a beefy man exhibiting his expanded chest and muscles and his postage-stamp wrestler’s trunks. Professor Eaton declared, and challenged any man alive to deny his statement, that his Indian Root Tonic would cure any ailment known to man, and quite a few known only to women.
Effie Henderson was the first person in town to give him a dollar for a bottle, and the first to come back for the second one.
The stand that Professor Eaton had opened up was the back seat of his mud-spattered touring car. He had paid the mayor ten ragged one-dollar bills for a permit to do business in Rawley, and he had parked his automobile in the middle of the weed-grown vacant lot behind the depot. He sold his medicine over the back seat of his car, lifting the green-blown botties from a box at his feet as fast as the customers came up and laid down their dollars.
There had been a big crowd standing around in the weed-grown lot the evening before, but there were only a few people standing around him listening to his talk when Effie came back in the morning for her second bottle. Most of the persons there then were Negroes who did not have a dollar between them, but who had been attracted to the lot by the alcoholic fumes around the mud-caked automobile and who were willing to be convinced of Indian Root Tonic’s marvelous curative powers. When Effie came up, the Negroes stepped aside, and stood in a horseshoe at a distance watching Professor Eaton get ready to make another sale.
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 42