“What! Peter Cooper Village ain’t good enough for you, chink? You wanta go to the suburbs?”
Herb retreated. He didn’t notice one of the boys creep behind him and crouch down. Falling backwards, Herb’s head slammed on the sidewalk. The leader lifted him by the collar and slugged him, splitting his lower lip.
“Get outta here you little shit,” he yelled as they ran away.
Too stunned to sit up, Herb lay patting his scalp and lip gashes in a feeble attempt to stanch the bleeding. Eventually, there were sirens. Herb was taken by ambulance to a hospital, propped up in a wheelchair, and rolled to an exam room where a pale, freckled, middle-aged man clad in green scrubs knelt down and looked into Herb’s eyes.
“I’m going make you numb, lad,” he said in an Irish accent, “Clean your cuts and sew them shut. Are you brave enough to lie still for that?”
Herb submitted willingly. No white adult had ever made such direct eye contact with him, not even a schoolteacher. That alone sufficed to convince him the man must be well-intentioned.
“You’ll get through it just fine,” the doctor promised.
Herb’s faith wavered when an anesthetic injected into the wounds burned hard enough to make him shed tears, but the warm, rinsing liquids that followed restored his trust, as did the doctor’s chipper apology, “Sorry, lad,” each time Herb felt a dull yank from sutures piercing and pulling his skin together. He had been given a pain pill that kicked in as the last thread was tied. The throbbing ceased, and true numbness came—a neutral buzz, constant, predictable, bearable.
Herb was asleep when his mother arrived. She bundled him into a taxi and brought him home. He spent the rest of the night buffeting between dreadful dreams and conscious pain. At some point during this fugue state, his father appeared, demanding information. Herb’s mouth was too swollen to make intelligible words.
His father returned at six in the morning. He made Herb get dressed and eat cereal. Though moving his lips was excruciating, Herb didn’t complain. He didn’t have to be told this was his own fault for not paying attention. His father drove them to a police station in lower Manhattan. They went from office to office through mustard-colored hallways reeking of stale tobacco smoke. Fluttering fluorescent lights made Herb dizzy. He found a bathroom and vomited.
His father insisted a criminal report be filed. Flash bulbs lacerated Herb’s headache as photographs were taken for evidence. The presiding officer was good-natured. Too good-natured. As his father filled out forms, the man grinned. Other policemen were smirking or outright laughing. Herb was incredulous his father couldn’t see he was the butt of their joke. Then he realized his father actually had noticed and was refusing to acknowledge the fact. Herb began to despise him.
Regaining self-control, Herb said, “You need to be relaxed for this. I’m going to give you a medication that’ll help. I’ll be surprised if you remember the experience afterwards. Ready?”
Larry nodded meekly. He watched Herb attach a syringe to his intravenous tubing and the fellow adjust dials on an ominous black box connected to a two foot length of cable.
“You’ll be getting sleepy soon.”
Alarmed by a burning sensation in his arm, Larry tensed. Pleasure suddenly bloomed in the back of his head. The fatigue, fear, and relentless labor of breathing dissipated.
Herb was speaking rapidly. Larry was unable to comprehend. Was it a foreign language? Latin? As the ceiling lights dimmed, Herb’s face was bathed by the glow emanating from the bronchoscope dials.
Now everything made sense to Larry. He remembered a priest, a regular on Haight Street, who wore a black Nehru jacket over his clerical collar. The man chatted with street people about hustling and drugs, but he didn’t proselytize. Instead, he helped them find housing, food, or a place to detox. He had never approached Larry until seeing him short of breath. When asked if he needed assistance, Larry declined. The priest gave him a card with the address of a local parish church. Once a half-block walk became the limit of his endurance, Larry reconsidered his options. He hoped Catholics had a different perspective on sin than Baptists.
The Sunday before he was admitted to City Hospital, Larry took a bus from Haight Street to Saint Ignatius. The street priest was at the pulpit, wrapped in a white robe, giving a sermon about purgatory. The term was vaguely familiar to Larry. He supposed it had something to do with suffering for your sins. The priest explained that individuals whose lives never strayed from virtue went straight to heaven while those who had never hesitated in being selfish went straight to hell. Purgatory was a waiting room for people who had made any effort to atone for their misdeeds.
“Mr. Winton,” said Herb. “You’re going to feel a tube go down your throat. Take in a long, slow breath.”
Larry did his best to cooperate. He understood what was happening. This doctor was Saint Peter. He had come to see Larry and decide whether to send him to heaven or hell. Fair enough, thought Larry, and he relaxed.
IX
AFTER DROPPING OFF ALLISON at school, Herb returned to his office. He found a note from Kevin taped to the door, asking him to attend noon conference. The case to be discussed would be Larry Winton. Herb knew Kevin’s team had just admitted fourteen patients to the wards in addition to Winton in the ICU, which meant Kevin would have already been awake for twenty-eight consecutive hours when the conference began. He wondered why Flagler, the elderly head of infectious diseases, said the residents were getting soft.
Herb sat at his desk dictating reports and letters for the rest of the morning. His office, part of an interior suite, had white walls and floors. Hospital wards fanned out in all directions, allowing Herb to see patients, teach, and conduct research with maximal efficiency. He didn’t mind working in a windowless hive. There was more than enough drama here to distract him. Seven years into this job, Herb was absolutely certain it would never become boring.
In the conference room, a chief resident sat on either side of Flagler who motioned Herb to join them at the “pontificators’ table.” Kevin stood at a blackboard that spanned the entire east wall. Chalk in hand, he made notes while his medical student summarized the case. Kevin wrote acronyms, distilling the salient features of Larry Winton’s history, physical exam findings, and laboratory results into an even briefer synopsis. He asked Herb to comment on the chest x-ray. Herb pointed out the obvious. Both lung fields were solid white throughout.
Kevin continued to make notes as the discussion proceeded. Larry Winton’s clinical diagnosis was severe pneumonia. The differential diagnosis Kevin scribbled on the board, a list of all plausible causes of his pneumonia in the order of their probability, numbered twenty by the end of the hour when people began leaving. Yet the process was hardly finished. It had been easy enough to achieve consensus in eliminating common causes. It was the obscure autoimmune, allergic, and infectious diseases that generated controversy. Kevin gained energy with each comment he wrote for or against a rare illness. He drew arrows connecting candidate diagnoses to tests which could confirm or exclude the condition and medications that could treat it. Since some tests could help nail down or rule out more than one diagnosis and some drugs could treat more than one disease, his arrows branched and crossed forming a web.
Herb left after two hours and worked in his office until four-thirty. On his way out of the hospital, he walked by the conference room. Kevin was still there, holding a stub of chalk, erasing and re-writing in the few empty interstices remaining on the blackboard. Herb was about to insist Kevin go home and sleep when his pager sounded. A moment later so did Kevin’s. Both displayed the ICU phone number, followed by 9-1-1. They looked at each other, said “Winton” simultaneously, and ran to the unit.
X
LARRY AWOKE FROM A nightmare. He had been kidnapped by his high school football team, hog-tied, and taken to the Trinity River. The boys were screaming “Die, homo, die!” as the quarterback dunked his head. Larry fought fiercely, thrashing to get his mouth above water for the half-sec
ond it took to get another small breath.
He opened his eyes to see he was in the glass cubicle, not Texas. But his frantic struggle to get more oxygen hadn’t ended. He grasped the bed rails and rocked backward to maximize inhalation then forward to expel every bit of air. Kevin was sitting next to him, extracting blood from the arterial catheter in his wrist. Dark purple liquid pulsed into the syringe, a familiar sight to Larry from his days of shooting speed, though something about it was wrong. Whenever a shooter’s point hit a vein, blood of this same purple hue would seep slowly into the syringe. It wouldn’t pulse like this. And if he hit an artery by mistake, the backflow would pulse like this, but the color was always bright red.
Kevin looked dejectedly at the syringe. He signaled to the pulmonary fellow waiting at the nurse’s station. She carried a toolbox into Larry’s room and removed trays filled with hollow plastic tubes and chrome instruments. Larry was terrified again. Were they going to cut a hole in his neck?
Kevin was talking about a machine that pumped oxygen into the lungs. Larry couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. Kevin moved on to another issue.
“Mr. Winton, is there a family member I can contact?”
“Don’t…bother,” he answered between breaths.
A technician wheeled in a mechanical ventilator.
“As soon as the tube is in place,” said Kevin, no longer able to hide his anxiety, “we’ll turn the machine on. Then your lungs will get enough oxygen. OK?”
Larry was listening now.
“You’ll have an uncontrollable urge to cough the tube out. We have to put you to sleep so the machine can do the work of breathing for you. It can’t help you if you’re fighting it. You understand?”
“Doc...will I …wake up? Or is this…just...easy way out?”
“No! Not at all! We’re buying time. We still don’t have all the bronchoscopy results. Once we know what’s causing your pneumonia, we can start treating it with the right drug.”
“OK…I’ll be…good soldier.”
As the fellow sprayed numbing medicine into Larry’s throat, Herb entered.
Praise God, Larry thought, Saint Peter’s back in charge.
Now the fellow was holding a short length of clear plastic piping, half an inch in diameter and covered with lubricating jelly, in front of Larry’s face. She instructed him to swallow as she thrust the tube into his left nostril. He retched. She forced the tube farther until it jammed into the back of his throat. He retched again.
Larry saw Herb wince.
“One more swallow,” she coaxed.
He tried to comply.
“Now inhale.”
Larry obeyed and felt the tube slide down his throat. He coughed violently.
“We’re in!” she yelled triumphantly.
“Inflate the cuff,” Herb calmly decreed.
Kevin attached an empty syringe to a side port on the tube. He pushed the plunger down, expanding a balloon-like sheath at the tube’s other end, which sealed off Larry’s windpipe. Kevin secured the tube to his nose and cheeks with strips of fabric tape. Herb pressed the ventilator power switch on.
A rush of air inflated Larry’s lungs. His terror was submerged in a wave of self-disgust. His body, once an object of desire, had been diminished to flesh of medical interest only. It repelled him. He wanted to be rid of it.
Kevin stroked his hand. Larry remembered being touched this way long before he had ever been penetrated or sucked for someone else’s gratification. A protective touch.
His mother had done that when he was a little boy and had measles. In a darkened bedroom on a steamy summer afternoon, Larry had been fitful. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find a comfortable position to rest. Sensing his frustration, his mother gently swept away the wet strands of hair stuck to his forehead.
As the intravenous anesthetic arrived in his brain, Larry began to cry. His craving to be sheltered vanished.
XI
WAITING FOR HER DAUGHTER outside of Proctor, Gwen saw Eva’s new teacher open the school’s front door. When he had been introduced to parents during the tense meeting after Eva’s old teacher abruptly quit, she had appreciated his engagement and composure. His strong jaw, impish smile, and lithe figure didn’t escape her attention either.
He must be a dancer or a runner, she thought. Probably younger than me, but not by much. He might not be gay either.
Eva’s teacher recognized her immediately. She imagined touching his chocolate skin, his closely sheared, woolly hair. Aware he had glanced at her bare left ring finger and was looking at her with more interest and enthusiasm than a fourth grader’s mother should expect, she blushed.
“Eva’s mom, right?” he said eagerly.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
Hoping he wouldn’t think she was imitating some sultry film star, her blush deepened. For God’s sake, she thought, he’ll only be her teacher until June.
“Mr. Parsons, right?”
“Just to the students. I’m Rick.”
“OK. Hi, Rick.”
“Hi..?”
“Gwen.”
“Gwen,” he said, clearly taking pleasure in pronouncing her name. “So… Eva’s doing well here.”
“I can tell. She likes school. She likes you, too.”
“The academic part is easy for her,” he said, lowering his voice professorially. “That helps a lot.”
Seeing a giddy sparkle in his eyes at odds with such an earnest assessment, she was emboldened to move beyond talking about Eva.
“So…is this job fun for you?”
“It is. Doesn’t pay well, but it is fun. Plus, I get to do something useful. At least I’m not making bombs.”
And there was the grin she was anticipating. Gwen crossed her arms, looked down, and giggled.
“You like what you do?” he asked with an intensity that could hardly be misconstrued as making idle conversation.
“I do. I’m proud of it, too.”
She met his eyes again and thought how wonderful it would be to have this in common—enjoying your work and feeling it made a positive social contribution—how much it would help in building sustainable intimacy. She remembered once sharing that bond with Daniel. It was the main reason she agreed to marry him. What a mistake that had been. But this man didn’t take himself so seriously.
As Rick started to ask what she did, Eva stomped between them. She scowled and dug a shoulder into Gwen, knocking her off balance. Gwen regained her footing and gave Eva an exasperated frown.
Though tempted to say, “Use your words, Eva, instead of hitting,” she realized forbearance would make a better impression than treating her daughter like a four year old.
“How was your day, darling?” said Gwen, her sarcasm unconcealed.
“Fine,” Eva growled.
Smiling at Rick, Gwen said, “I think this girl is tired.”
“Yeah,” he agreed wistfully.
“See you.”
Eva took her hand as they walked toward her car.
“Bye,” he sang out to them.
I can wait until June, thought Gwen. Hope you can.
After cleaning the dinner dishes, Gwen plopped on their overstuffed couch, purchased at a flea market. Eva crawled onto her lap and braided Gwen’s hair, blond when Eva was a baby, now sandy brown. At eight o’clock, Eva jumped up to turn on the television set. While her focus was on the screen, Gwen watched her laugh at the situation comedy. Eva had Daniel’s loose black curls and aquiline nose and was as quick-witted as her father. Unlike Daniel, she could appreciate the humor of others.
Eva leaned forward in anticipation of her favorite moment, when the loveable bigot would call his son-in-law “Meathead.” Gwen marveled at how much happier Eva seemed than she had been at this age. What would Eva’s favorite memory be in twenty years? Watching television at night with her single, working mom? She hoped Eva would have better than that, but laughing at Archie Bunker together would be good enough.
Gwen’s best
memory from fourth grade was reading alone in her bedroom. That was the year her family disintegrated and she started working hard at school so she could eventually escape to college.
At the first chords of the show’s closing theme, Gwen said, “Time for bed.”
Eva did her Frankenstein imitation, arms stretched out, legs stiff, rocking from side to side. As Gwen guided Eva to the bathroom, she thought of how “time for bed” might sound if said seductively to Rick.
“God, I’m pathetic,” she muttered.
Eva went to sleep, and Gwen lay awake listening to her favorite jazz cassette. She loved the piano’s quirky melodic line, its unexpected shifts in tempo and key, the naked emotion of the music. She wished she had someone to snuggle next to, someone comfortable with life’s capriciousness. This made her think of Daniel, a man with no tolerance for uncertainty. Her fantasy was replaced by resentment.
“What had I been thinking, marrying him?”
They met the summer of 1964 in Hinds County, Mississippi. Gwen, about to be a senior at Stanford, and Daniel, a law school student, were volunteers in a voter registration campaign. Sixty-seven black churches, businesses, and homes were bombed or burned that summer. Three volunteers were murdered by Klansmen. The danger bred fear, but it also fueled their idealism. Gwen was intoxicated by the political discussions and by Daniel, a master at debating the issues. She consented to marry him after graduation.
Their marriage fared well while the rigors of medical school and internship distracted her from Daniel’s pettiness, the judgmental comments aimed at her. She didn’t fully understand her mistake until Eva turned one, and she was ready to find a job. Gwen wanted to hire a nanny. Daniel, now a public defender, was adamantly opposed. He wanted Eva in day-care, like working-class children. Their kitchen became a courtroom where she was pilloried for her reactionary tendencies and bourgeois conventions. Civility disappeared once Gwen, concerned that Daniel rarely held Eva, started criticizing his failure to bond with their daughter. His attacks on her selfishness and privilege escalated. The day he categorically refused to try couples therapy, she faced reality and began looking for an attorney. Daniel fought it like a death row case. It took them three years to settle the divorce terms. Meanwhile, both her parents had died. She used her inheritance to buy a two-bedroom bungalow in the Oakland hills.
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