by Linda Wolfe
“Sure it will. It’ll make me not feel at all.”
Just then a strident ringing of the phone and a flashing yellow light distracted Ben from pursuing his argument. “Shall I get it?” he asked Sidney, who had slumped further down into his chair.
“No. I don’t want to speak to anyone. I don’t care who the hell it is.” Shutting his eyes, Sidney added, “I don’t feel like talking. I don’t even feel like moving. I didn’t even go to the hospital this morning.”
“Who operated for you?”
“I canceled. It was all elective stuff. I rescheduled everybody.”
Ben was dumfounded. Although he had foreseen the possibility of Sidney’s collapse into irresponsibility, he had not expected it to manifest itself so soon. Yet the phone was still ringing and now Sidney lurched forward, grabbed the instrument between clenched fingers, and hurled it off his desk, flinging it as far as its curled tether would allow. Then he stood up and shouted, “I’m not here! I’m not here! I’m not here!”
“I’ll tell Miss Palchek,” Ben said swiftly. “In fact, why don’t you just go home? If there’s anything urgent, I’ll see to it.” The light on the phone had stopped flashing.
“I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here. I just don’t want to speak to anyone or see anyone.”
“Okay,” Ben pacified him. “I’ll make it clear to Miss Palchek. We’ll see to it you’re not disturbed.”
Sidney slumped down into his chair. “Thanks, old buddy. I’ll be all right in a while.” He put his arms on his desk and his head sunk down on top of them.
Ben retrieved the phone, untangling its wire, and set it gently back on Sidney’s desk. Then he hurried outside and explained to Miss Palchek that Sidney really didn’t want to be disturbed, not for anything, and that she simply had to learn how to deflect his calls.
“But what about the emergencies?” she asked helplessly.
Ben sighed. “Pass them on to me.”
Fortunately there were no real emergencies that morning, just two husbands irate that their wives had not been operated on as scheduled and demanding that Sidney explain to them why he had changed his mind. Ben was excessively polite with the first man, saying that Sidney had been called upon to operate on a woman with a Fallopian tube pregnancy. “She was in considerable pain,” he apologized. “And danger. I imagine my brother didn’t want to lose a moment. I’m sure he’ll call you as soon as he’s able.” But with the second man who phoned, he was less ingratiating.
“I want to speak to Dr. Sidney Zauber,” the man began shouting as soon as Ben explained who he was. “I don’t care who the hell you are.”
“He’s not available,” Ben said coldly, annoyed at the man’s explosiveness.
“Well he damn well better get available. This is the second time he’s postponed my wife’s surgery, and he didn’t explain himself the first time, either.”
“He must have had his reasons.”
The man didn’t calm down but went on talking angrily about his wife’s condition and the fact that he had already missed two days’ work to be with her when she came out of anesthesia. “I want Sidney Zauber to call me and explain what’s going on,” the husband fumed. “Right away!”
“As I told you, he’s unavailable,” Ben repeated, and then an amusing notion popped into his head and he finished his statement by saying, “But I think he’ll be here in just a few minutes. What was your name again? I’ll have him call you first thing.”
Five minutes later he telephoned the man and, making his voice deeper and as much like Sidney’s as he could, said, “Mr. Burton? Sidney Zauber here.” At once the man began shouting, but Ben spoke over his words, “Mr. Burton, I’m afraid I’ve got some rather unpleasant news for you. Your wife’s condition is not as simple as we thought.”
Immediately, there was silence on the other end of the phone.
“We’re going to need some more tests before we go in.”
“More tests?” Mr. Burton sounded suddenly panic-stricken.
He was really being taken for Sidney, Ben thought. It was the second time this year that it had happened to him. The first time, with his mother, it had unnerved him, but this time he was finding it quite entertaining. Making his voice even gruffer, he began to doubletalk about blood and tissue tests.
Would Sidney mind, he wondered idly as he talked. But no, how could he mind? Didn’t he always say he hated to be checked up on? He was merely doing what Sidney himself would have done if he had found himself being excoriated by so irascible a man as Mr. Burton. “Could be complications unless we get the tests,” he muttered. “Immense complications.”
“Yes, of course.” Mr. Burton was altogether subdued.
“You ought to thank your lucky stars I delayed,” Ben concluded, imitating Sidney at his harshest. Then he hung up abruptly and, smiling made a note to remind Sidney to order some special tests for Mrs. Burton if he recovered himself sufficiently to call the hospital this afternoon.
By two o’clock, just as Ben was on his way over to the hospital to do his rounds, Sidney did appear to have recovered. He knocked on the door of Ben’s office and, entering, sat down in the patients’ chair alongside Ben’s desk and thanked him profusely for his understanding in the morning and for handling his calls. “I’m okay now. I really am,” he said in a convincingly brisk voice. “I’m going to start seeing my afternoon people now, and I’ll get over to the hospital around four.”
“You’re sure you’re up to seeing patients?”
“Quite sure. I wouldn’t risk it otherwise.”
Ben appraised Sidney thoughtfully. He was wearing his starched white lab coat and his face appeared more rested, his eyes less dull. Yes, Sidney was all right now. But how long would he stay that way? “How’s Claudia?” Ben asked irrelevantly. “When’s she coming back from Boston?”
“Why? Is she due to see you?”
“No. Not until the end of the month. I was just wondering.”
“Yeah. Well, her mother’s been a little depressed. She’s going to stay up there another day or two, to see what she can do to help.”
“I see,” Ben nodded. But he suspected that Sidney was more in need of Claudia’s presence than her mother was. He thought of calling Claudia at her mother’s house and saying something to her about returning as swiftly as she could. But why make her rush home to face Sidney’s disturbing condition? At least at her mother’s house she could enjoy the sea air, nourish her senses, go for walks, sleep soundly at night. She would be sleeping in the turreted bedroom she had occupied as a child, he mused, remembering the time he had visited her mother’s seaside home and Sidney had taken him on the tour. She would be sleeping in her girlhood bed. She would be sleeping alone.
“I told her to stay with her mother and get a good rest,” Sidney commented. “She’d never have gone if I hadn’t urged her.”
“I know,” Ben said. “I’m sure.”
In the next few weeks Sidney came late to the office every morning and sometimes, right after he had arrived, he would abruptly change his mind about seeing the women who sat eagerly waiting for him and would direct Miss Palchek to cancel his appointments and send all his patients home. “I just can’t see anyone today,” he would say, offering no explanation for his decision.
Miss Palchek quit one morning, agreeing to hire her own replacement if Sidney would accept her resignation as of the end of the week. He did, and two days later another new nurse, an elderly woman named Miss Viviani, was sitting at Cora’s old desk making Sidney’s excuses for keeping patients waiting for hours on end or for dismissing them altogether. But even when Sidney did get around to seeing his patients, Miss Viviani had her hands full. Sidney was perpetually antagonizing patients and Miss Viviani was perpetually having to assuage them.
Hardly a day went by when Ben, passing through the waiting room, didn’t hear Sidney’s voice raised in intense argument, and sometimes he could even hear it when he was in his own office, far across the cor
ridors from Sidney’s. One day, he overheard Sidney telling a pregnant woman that she was not following his dietary instructions. “You look disgusting,” his voice carried out into the waiting room. “Like an animal!”
The woman, emerging into the corridor a moment later, stumbled past Ben in tears.
He went into Sidney’s office and tried to reason with him. “You’ll be losing patients if you carry on like this all the time.”
Sidney shrugged. “When a woman eats the way that one’s doing, she’s making misery for me and for herself, too. Complicating the delivery.”
“Still, you didn’t have to be so insulting.”
“It’s the best way to get through. To get her to change.”
Ben retreated. Sidney seemed to have a reasonable explanation for his tirade.
But he began to hear Sidney more and more often. Sometimes, his voice overbearing and indignant, he was chastising women who were trying to become pregnant, shouting at them that they had been passive about following his timetables for sexual intercourse. Sometimes it was women who wanted abortions at whom he railed, loudly accusing them of having been careless at using their birth control methods. And sometimes he mercilessly excoriated women who had come in for breast examinations on dates long past the ones they had been asked to observe.
These women seemed particularly irresponsible to him. When, on several occasions, he detected in one or another of them potentially cancerous masses, he would be callously blunt about his suspicions.
One morning the hapless patient was a youthful, pony-tailed woman with sad, deeply ringed eyes. Sidney buzzed Ben and asked him to come around at once; he had found a knoblike lump in the woman’s left breast. Ben entered Sidney’s examining room nervously, passed his fingers over the woman’s breast, probed the lump, and thought it was indeed like a knob, that it would turn the woman off, but kept silent as Sidney began demanding excitedly, “Well? Well? It’s C.A., right? No question about it.”
Ben went on palpating the woman’s breast with one hand and at the same time shook his head vigorously, trying to get Sidney to keep still. The woman looked as if life had already dealt her a number of harsh and unexpected blows.
“Not cancer?” Sidney said.
The young woman struggled upward, her neck arching.
“We’ll want you to have mammography,” Ben said soothingly, easing the woman back down again. “And of course, it’s early. It’s a good thing you noticed it so early and came in right away.”
“Bullshit,” Sidney shouted at Ben, and then he said to the woman, “You must have had this lump for weeks. Months. But when I operate and there’s cancer in the nodes, you’ll tell me I spread it there.”
The woman sat up again, her face ashen. “It’s always the surgeon’s fault,” Sidney said. “Show me a woman who takes responsibility for her own deterioration and I’ll show you a goddess.”
Amazed, Ben once again shook his head, this time glaring at Sidney, but Sidney ignored him. “Show me a woman who takes responsibility for her own body …” he began, but before he could continue his sentence, the woman swayed dizzily and fainted.
Ben made her lie down again until her vertigo passed. Then he talked to her consolingly and had the slow-moving Miss Viviani make a mammography appointment for her. He was calm and deliberate. But as soon as the woman was gone, he snapped at Sidney, “Why did you break the news to her so bluntly? Why did you have to be so harsh?”
“Because I’m sick of having to coddle people who expect me to do the impossible.”
“But you terrified that woman.”
“She terrified me. I’m terrified of these surefire disasters. Every surgeon we know is, but they all pretend it’s nothing.”
“Well, you certainly can stop being terrified now. That woman will never come back.”
“Wanna bet?”
“She’ll go to another surgeon.”
“Who cares? Let her. Let her blame him for mutilating her.”
Ben was appalled at Sidney’s cruelty, and yet he felt it was understandable. His tongue loosened by barbiturates, Sidney had simply expressed something that many doctors thought but kept to themselves. He had been brutal, but behind the brutality there had been logic.
It was only after the incident that Ben decided that the drugs were striking at the keenness of Sidney’s mind, obscuring his logic and magnifying his brutality. As he continued to increase his barbiturate dosage, ignoring all of Ben’s repeated pleas to stop, his tirades began to make less and less sense. Ben heard him cursing for the sake of cursing, insulting for the sake of insulting, screaming for the sake of screaming. One afternoon he listened to him expelling a woman from his office for questioning him too closely about the side effects of various birth control methods. “Every interference has its risks,” he was shouting. “In medicine. In life too. Goddamn it, in life too!”
Ben shuddered. The degree of Sidney’s fury had virtually no relevance to the specific situation. As soon as the woman who had triggered the attack had fled, he hurried into Sidney’s office and said, “You’ve got to grab hold of yourself, Sid. The barbiturates aren’t calming you. They’re making you more and more agitated.”
“That’s my business,” Sidney answered him sharply.
“Surely it’s mine too. If you keep this up, you won’t have any patients left. And I can’t afford the office on my own.”
Sidney simply shrugged. “I don’t think it matters to my patients how I treat them, as long as I treat them.”
Ben left, discouraged, for the truth of the matter was that while a few patients had begun dropping Sidney now that he was so ill-tempered, many others were continuing to demand appointments with him. He wondered if any of them suspected that their physician was a drug addict, but concluded that none of them did. It was a thought too far beyond their imaginations.
The nurses were another story. There were three of them including Miss Viviani, the newest, and he was sure that, given their pooled experience and wisdom, they knew Sidney was on something. Yet although they were alarmed by Sidney, they covered up for him, explaining his actions to patients as well as they could, making excuses for him, softening his words whenever possible. They were, Ben supposed, as protective of the medical profession as he was, as interested in keeping it from scandal or condemnation.
Of course, they gossiped about Sidney among themselves. He had overheard them. But they spoke of him as being explosive or agitated or paranoid, naming his symptoms but not his ailment. Nor did they ever ask direct questions about his condition. Perhaps they hoped that by not giving it a name, they could avoid responsibility for his actions.
It was the same with the interns and residents at the hospital. And even with Sidney’s peers, the other attendings and medical school professors. Martin Stearns had stopped him in the hospital corridors one afternoon and said, “I hear Sidney isn’t feeling well. Is that true?” When he had nodded, “Yes,” Stearns had said sympathetically, “Tell Sid I hope he’s feeling better soon,” but oddly enough he’d showed no curiosity about the nature of Sidney’s illness.
Alithorn was equally uninquisitive, at least at first. But late in June Ben saw him talking to Sidney outside his office, his handsome, suntanned face looking unusually tired and troubled. Several days later he asked Ben to stop by and see him.
“Your brother’s always been known as a moody guy, right?” he began, as Ben nodded nervously in the chair alongside his mammoth roll-top desk, an antique Alithorn had insisted be installed in his office. His was the only antiques-furnished office in the glass-walled modern building. He had chosen the antiques, he would explain to anyone who asked, because he believed they inspired trust and confidence in patients. He was fond of saying that medicine, like religion, had only started to invite disaffection once it espoused modern architecture. “Sidney had a reputation for temper tantrums long before I ever knew him, right?” he prodded Ben, looking over his head toward the door in his familiar distracted fashion.
Ben nodded again. Alithorn put his chin on his hands and, for the first time, gave him his full attention. “But his personality’s been getting out of hand,” he said. “He’s been screaming at nurses, cancelling operations, terrorizing the interns. He needs a psychiatrist. You know what I mean?”
Ben said at once, “Yes, I believe so.” Alithorn’s expression was stern. He wondered how much he actually knew about what was causing Sidney’s explosions.
“Good,” Alithorn continued. “Now, I’m not asking any questions, and I don’t intend to ask any. I’ve told Sidney this and I think he understood me. What psychiatric clinic he goes to is entirely up to him. It needn’t be ours at all. But he obviously needs some treatment, and I’m more than willing to grant him a medical leave for as long as it takes. I’m counting on you to see to it that he goes.”
Ben felt dismayed. “I’ve told him that myself,” he blurted out. “So has his wife. Isn’t there anything else you can suggest? Is there any way you can make sure he goes?”
Alithorn scratched at his chin. Then he looked away from Ben and pulled one of his small netsuke animals from his jacket pocket and began stroking it. “You’ve told him and he doesn’t care?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Stroking the figurine, Alithorn slowly shook his head and when he spoke, sounded discouraged. “What can I do?” he said. “Medical leaves are strictly voluntary. Of course, there’s such a thing as suspension. Removing a man’s operating privileges. But it’s hardly Number One on the Hit Parade.”
Ben stared at him, puzzled.
“Hardly the court of first resort. There have been some hellish lawsuits over removing a doctor’s privileges. It’s an ugly business. It can be as bad for the hospital as it is for the man himself. Unless, of course, the doctor in question has seriously broken hospital rules. Not shown up at staff meetings. Not kept legitimate records.” He paused and looked at Ben unhappily. “Or wantonly harmed a patient.”