by Linda Wolfe
Her tears subsided and he went on. “I think you’d better begin using a breast pump. Just to keep yourself ready. I’m going to tell the nurses to get you started.”
“You are? You really think the baby’s going to be all right?”
“Of course I do. I’m sure of it.”
He had almost convinced himself until he stopped in the nursery and saw the baby’s pale grayish color. Diehl was there too, agitated and ashen faced himself. “I’m sorry,” Ben said to him.
The obstetrical resident didn’t reply.
“Any improvement?” Ben asked.
“Not yet,” Diehl finally muttered.
Ben looked down at the baby in its glass nest.
“I called you in time,” the younger man said then, speaking up.
“Sure you did.”
“I thought you were going to say I called you late,” Diehl went on nervously. “It’s been known to happen. I have a friend who got kicked out of Midstate because an attending lied about when my friend called him.”
“You don’t have much confidence in me, do you?” Ben frowned.
“It isn’t you. It’s this place. The buck-passing.” Behind Diehl’s bravado, Ben could hear how worried he was.
“You don’t need to worry,” Ben said. “I’m not like that.”
The resident looked up, suddenly grateful. “I’m sorry,” he said, and Ben realized how young he was. No more than twenty-seven, he thought. “You should get some sleep,” he advised him paternally.
“I can’t. Who can sleep around here? I’d give my right arm for two full nights of sleep.”
Ben lingered a while, feeling close to Diehl, understanding the depths of his exhaustion and anxiety. But there was nothing else he could think of saying to the younger man and, finally, taking a last look at the baby, he excused himself and hurried out of the nursery. Sidney would be back from Washington by now and would be coming to the hospital to do his rounds. He didn’t want to run into Sidney. Not now. Not yet. Tomorrow, when the baby pulled through, then he could talk to Sidney about it.
He raced for the back elevator but to his dismay when it stopped for him he saw Sidney, looking elegant in a new blue cashmere coat and carrying a bulging briefcase, pushing out from behind a crowd of strangers. And immediately after Sidney emerged, so too did Thomas Alithorn, the chief of ob-gyn. Ben backtracked, turning toward the direction from which he had come, but Sidney saw him and called out, “Hey, Ben. Wait up a minute.”
Ben walked reluctantly back. Sidney and Alithorn were deep in conversation. “Fascinating,” Alithorn was saying. “Absolutely fascinating.” Alithorn’s aging face was well tanned, the result of daily tennis. When he saw Ben, he nodded, but his eyes seemed to stare right through him. Looking at Sidney again he said, “Come on over to my office and let’s talk about it further.”
Ben was used to being ignored by Alithorn. A political man, Alithorn picked his friends carefully, concentrating on the powerful old-timers or the up-and-coming stars. Still, he ran the department efficiently and was well thought of by the administration because he brought in a lot of money in the form of bequests and endowments. “I’ll need to hear more,” he was saying to Sidney, “But sure, it sounds possible. We’d like to help out.”
Sidney set his briefcase down between his legs and pulled out a reprint, handing it to Alithorn. “I’m afraid I’m going to be tied up for a while. But here. Read this, and maybe we can talk about it Saturday.”
“Fine. See you Saturday at eight.” Alithorn, taking the reprint, hurried down the corridor.
As soon as he was gone, Ben said, “I’ve got to go, too,” and pressed the elevator button again, but Sidney asked, “What’s your hurry?”
“I thought you were in a hurry,” Ben said nervously, still not wanting to talk with Sidney.
“Why? Oh, you mean what I said to Alithorn?” Sidney glanced at the chief’s retreating back. “That was just politicking. Never seem eager when someone wants to do you a favor.” He gave Ben a paternal smile. Then he bent down and closed his briefcase. “Alithorn may let me take over some more lab space. And use some of the residents. A couple of them are very keen to do research. Matthews, Diehl. Diehl called me this morning and asked to work with me.”
“Diehl?” Ben said edgily.
“Yeah. By the way, he said you’d had a bad baby last night.” Pulling off a paisley silk scarf, Sidney asked, “Still bad?”
“Yeah,” Ben nodded disconsolately.
“Well, don’t worry about it. You win some, you lose some. Anyway, Kinney’s not exactly what you could call unlucky. Doesn’t she have two kids already?”
“The baby’s not lost yet,” Ben said, disheartened by Sidney’s casualness. “It may pull through.”
“Yes, but if it does, it’ll probably be a vegetable.” Sidney shrugged again. He prided himself on always taking a realistic approach to problems and saw pessimism as realism.
“Not necessarily.”
“Well, I hope you’re right, old buddy. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.” Sidney picked up his briefcase, stooping a little from the weight. Then suddenly he set it down again and said, “What went wrong with the delivery?”
“I was late. I had the baby delayed.”
Sidney leaned closer to Ben. “Sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t tell anyone about that.” Sidney had lowered his voice. “Let them think Diehl called you late.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not? Don’t be a schmuck.” Sidney rubbed a still-gloved hand across his forehead. “There’s liable to be a malpractice suit,” he whispered. “There’ll be one for sure if the baby dies. But even if it lives, if it’s retarded, there could be one. And how do you think that’ll look for our practice?”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“Damn right you weren’t.” Sidney was struggling to keep his voice low. “Well, forget it. Just let me take care of it. Diehl’s very anxious to get into research.”
“I can’t let him take the blame.
“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”
“But I already told Diehl it was my fault and that I’d stick by him.”
“Well, you’re not going to.” Suddenly Sidney pulled off his gloves and stretched out a hand toward Ben’s jacket. “For Diehl, it’ll all blow over in a while,” he said. “It wouldn’t for you.” Sidney’s fingers groped, then closed around the plastic container in Ben’s pocket. “You have too much to hide,” Sidney whispered. “So don’t act like a damn fool.”
A moment later, Sidney was gone and Ben was standing alone in the corridor, ashamed. He hated Sidney’s advice and himself for having provoked it. He wanted to kick something. Anything.
Alone, he left the hospital and began to wander, first to the icy river, then across town and into the park, a snowy polar terrain. There was nothing new in Sidney’s urging him to compromise himself, he thought as he walked, feeling like a lonely arctic explorer left behind by hardier comrades.
It had happened so many times before. He remembered the time he had written on limnology for his high school biology course. Visiting the Museum of Natural History, he had become fascinated by the museum’s replicas and diagrams of freshwater ponds, the mysterious balance between the big fish and the small, the way the waters teemed with life. And so he had decided to write his term report on the subject, the very decision giving him a sense of purpose and accomplishment. And the research went so well that gradually he began to change his mind about science. He had disliked it at the start of high school, and had done mediocre work in chemistry. But he felt enthusiastic about biology.
Sidney was off at Cornell taking pre-med, and one day Ben wrote to him and told him that perhaps he too would, after all, plan on a career in science, perhaps become a biologist or even a doctor. Sidney had written back, “Fantastic! Who knows? If you become a doctor, maybe we could share a practice s
omeday.”
But he had warned Ben that he’d better get a top grade in biology. “You got a B in chemistry. You’ll have to pull an A in biology or else you won’t get into a college with a good science program. And if you don’t do that, you won’t stand a chance of getting into a good med school.”
Ben increased his efforts on the term paper and when Sidney was home at Easter vacation, showed it to him. But Sidney hated it. “Why’d you choose limnology?” he had asked. “You should have picked the cell. Or the circulatory system. Something important.” Ben had explained limply, “I liked it.” Sidney had shrugged and said, “Tell you what. I’ll write a paper for you while I’m home.” Ben demurred, but Sidney was insistent. “You picked the wrong topic, old buddy,” he said. “You’ll never get as good a grade with this as you’d get if you did the cell.” Ben had finally acquiesced, and he got an A in biology, although he was never quite certain what grade he would have gotten if he had used his own paper.
In college—unlike Sidney he went to City and lived at home to save Sara money—he and Sidney had similar altercations. To Sidney, anything short of glowing success was failure, and he was always predicting failure for Ben and trying to get him to forestall it through deceit, urging him to cheat on exams, hire a fellow student to go over his papers for him, even to subscribe to a thesis-writing service he had read about somewhere.
Sidney never practiced deceit to advance his own career. He didn’t have to. But when it came to Ben’s career, he believed it was essential.
It wasn’t that Ben was doing badly in college. He was as smart as the next fellow, if not as brilliant as Sidney. But, knowing Ben’s early slowness, Sidney never quite trusted his advances during adolescence and young manhood. It was as if the past had greater reality than the present. When Ben found the work in medical school extremely difficult, Sidney said, “There’s only one way a guy like you can make it through. You’re going to have to start studying all night.”
Ben promised to try. But he couldn’t do it. To help him, Sidney, already an intern, produced amphetamines to keep him awake for hours on end, and barbiturates to permit him brief restorative naps. “No harm in these,” Sidney said. “No harm in anything but failure.”
Following Sidney’s advice, Ben had made it through medical school, and later through a grueling internship and residency, and at last he had become, like Sidney himself, a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. Yet he always felt himself to be an inferior doctor. Years later, thoroughly disillusioned with himself, he returned to the barbiturates he had first come to enjoy during medical school. He monitored his habit, tried to keep it from overwhelming his life. But he never tried to give it up. It made failure tolerable.
Wandering through the park, his legs finally grew so weary that he felt grateful. He would be able to sleep now. Able to sleep even without the pills. He didn’t want to have to take them. Not tonight, when at any minute the Kinney baby might die and he would have to break the news to Annette. Stamping through the snow onto an unfamiliar windy corner, he hailed a cab and rode to his apartment.
But he couldn’t sleep. Lying exhausted on the living room couch, he kept thinking that if the Kinney baby died, he would blame himself fiercely for its brief labored life. And even if it lived, if it was in any way damaged, he would still blame himself, no matter whom Sidney blamed officially. And he would blame himself for whatever happened to Diehl, would have Diehl on his conscience too.
But he had no choice. As Sidney had said, he had too much to hide to risk a malpractice suit. Such a suit might dredge up his addiction and possibly result in suspension from the hospital. As long as he was taking his pills, he’d have to do what Sidney advised. And he couldn’t give them up. They were the jewels with which he courted his beloved sleep.
Lying on his back, he withdrew the container from his pocket and spread a few yellow capsules on his palm. Golden and shiny in their clear jell covers, they seemed to him jewels indeed, and he held them gently and then at last got up and went into the kitchen to fill a glass of water. There was no point in fooling himself; he needed the pills.
Far below, outside the kitchen window, was a wide landscaped courtyard and, as he ran the water in the sink, he could hear sounds carried upward through the yard, music, a child crying, a door slamming, other people’s lives being lived. He lifted the pills toward his mouth but suddenly his eyes narrowed and his fist tightened around them. Holding them hidden, he thought of the story Sara still told about her childhood in Russia, about how on a moonlit snowy night she had tossed a necklace of pearly white beads out of the window, expecting, or so she told it, that when the spring sun shone and melted the snow, the beads too would disintegrate into pale gray rivulets. Instead, she had found the necklace in the spring, the chain on which the beads were strung rusted and green, but the beads themselves still a pearly vivid white against the new grass.
Raising the courtyard window, he abruptly scattered his fistful of pills out into the snow. Then he dug in his pocket, took out the container, unscrewed it and shook out the rest of the smooth, golden capsules, watching them scatter into the wind.
That morning at seven-thirty the pediatric resident called him from the hospital. “You know the Kinney baby?” Ben held his breath. “It’s off the oxygen. And it looks as if there’s nothing else wrong. For now, at least.”
“Does Mrs. Kinney know?” His misery of the night before was evaporating.
“Not yet. We thought you’d want to know before we told her.”
“Great,” Ben said. “Good work. I’m coming over right now. Don’t tell her. I’d like to tell her myself.”
He felt, as he walked swiftly to the hospital, that once again he was in his flying dream, his body weightless and perfect. He felt it still when he swirled open the curtains around Annette Kinney’s bed.
She was sitting up, using the breast pump, and he was glad that he had thought of that distraction for her. But she was drawn-faced and there were tear streaks on her cheeks. “Now why are you crying?” he asked, scarcely able to contain his excitement. “Didn’t I tell you not to let yourself get all upset?”
“I’m just so terribly worried,” Annette said. “So scared.” She set down the little rubber pump and covered herself with the rough sheet, wiping her eyes with a corner of it.
“Well, you don’t need to be,” he beamed. “And you’d better pull yourself together right away. You’ve got this happy, healthy baby out there that needs you.”
Annette stared at him, her eyes going wide with disbelief.
“They’ll be bringing the baby to you for the eleven o’clock feeding,” Ben went on. “You haven’t missed a beat.”
Comprehension and relief began to spread across Annette’s face.
“Shall we walk over and see him together? Or do you want to call Frank first and tell him?”
Annette had her feet over the side of the bed already. “After,” she said, stumbling into her slippers.
He gathered up her orlon robe and helped her into it, standing formal and dignified behind her as if he were wrapping her in an evening coat.
“Let’s go see the baby first,” she said, and took his arm.
They promenaded together down the corridor. “I told you it would be just a matter of a day or so,” he said. He loved the almost palpable happiness that seemed to suffuse her, making her skin bright, and refrained from telling her how worried he still was. Only time would reveal whether the baby had received any permanent damage as a result of its oxygen deprivation.
“What do you suppose happened?” Annette asked happily.
“Who knows?” he hedged. “There are so many mysteries about birth. There’s so much we don’t know.”
The baby was in a nurse’s arms, being diapered. Ben hardly recognized it except for its dark thatch of hair. It was red-cheeked and howling and unblemished. Annette dropped Ben’s arm and pressed close to the glass. She had forgotten about Ben.
He couldn’t forget
about her. The incident haunted him. Although he had been taking barbiturates regularly for several years now, he had never before slept through a call to the hospital or endangered the health of a patient or a patient’s baby. He had thought himself immune to such possibilities because he had monitored his habit carefully. He had never, until the night he had learned of Claudia’s pregnancy, taken more than the tolerance-producing dose of six hundred milligrams a day. Never allowed himself the street addict’s ignorant climb to ever higher and higher amounts. But despite the educated way he had handled his habit, it had put someone in peril. He made up his mind to stay off the drugs.
It was difficult, more difficult than the abrupt withdrawal itself. That was accomplished after three days of stomach cramps, nausea and weakness. He told Cora he had the flu, had her cancel all his appointments and stayed at home, shivering. In a corner of his bedroom was an overstuffed armchair from which one night, he didn’t remember which or at what hour it had been, he had crazily ripped each cloth-covered button and held them in a sweating palm and at last put a few in his yearning mouth and swallowed, gagging before he vomited them onto the carpet.
But he hadn’t fainted, hadn’t had convulsions. Indeed, he hadn’t experienced any of the more extreme effects that sudden withdrawal could produce in those who took higher doses of the drug. His real difficulties set in later, once the physical dependence was conquered. He was anxious, tremulous, and totally incapable of sleeping. His insomnia was a mutiny against his body, a nightly tossing and twisting of his limbs that left him feeling whipped and beaten toward morning and always, in those silent hours just before dawn, utterly abandoned and alone. He came to long for the very thing he had once most hated, the 4 or 5 A.M. call to hurry to the hospital for a delivery.
But no matter how acute his insomnia and loneliness became, he didn’t let them drive him to writing himself a new barbiturate prescription. Every dawn, awake and brooding, he kept picturing Annette Kinney’s tear-streaked face and hearing Diehl’s agitated voice. He remembered his own residency and didn’t agree with Sidney that no harm would befall the young man if he were blamed for the delay in the baby’s birth. At the very least, his reputation would be stained, so that he would be starting his career with a serious mark against him.