The Doctor Stories

by William Carlos Williams

  I do remember one woman, though. God, it was a crime. You can imagine what I mean. Here I was, a kid never knowing anything at all. I was having the time of my life. Yes, everything, you’re right. I held her while he did the job. I often think of it.

  That was the romantic period of my life, those four months I lived with him.

  He never kept any track of money. There wasn’t a book around the place. Any money he got he shoved it in his pocket. But he never paid for anything, either.

  Clever? That boy was there! He’d go over to his desk and you’d see him fumbling around with some instruments. And right in front of you he’d give himself a shot and, unless you were wise, you wouldn’t see him do it.

  He was foxy too. He’d stall for a few minutes to give it time to act. That was when he had anything important to do. He’d wait a few minutes, then he’d come out steely-eyed and as quiet and steady as the best of them.

  That was the difference between him and her. It made her crazy. She didn’t know how to control it, but it steadied him down.

  Many’s the time he’d wake me up in the middle of the night to go out with him. Down at Johnny Kessler’s was one of his hangouts where he’d go for soft-shell crabs and clam chowder.

  Once he gave me some tickets for a show in New York. Some dirty racket, I’ve forgotten. He told me to get some of my friends and go in and have a good time. He gave us the tickets and started us off on his own liquor. It was the first show of that kind I’d ever taken in.

  When I came home next morning, he himself took care of me, undressed me and put me to bed.

  I can remember one night while I was living there, he waked me up at two o’clock in the morning. It was in summer, one of those hot, muggy nights. I’d been operated on too, the day before, he’d taken out my tonsils or something and I was feeling rotten. But that didn’t make any difference, I had to go out with him just the same.

  We got the old buggy and started out. We went down in the meadows, at two A.M. mind you, down to Mooney’s saloon, the old halfway house, you know where it is. He went in and left me there. The mosquitos nearly ate me alive. He had a case in there or something, maybe he took a few drinks. I don’t know what.

  Anyway, I sat there slapping mosquitos. The old man came out after a while and told me the Doc was asleep and that they didn’t want to wake him. So I, kid like, not wanting to make a fuss or anything, I said all right and just sat there. He left me there in that buggy till five A.M. Jesus!

  Then he came out and we went home. When we got there, he said, Let’s have some lamb chops! So out we went again, to the butcher’s. He went to the door and of course it was closed. So he went up on the porch around at the side and stamped and banged until that fellow had to get up and come down and get him his chops out of the ice box.

  Then we went home and he cooked them in the kitchen. And, say, he could cook. He was a wonderful cook. He could make a piece of meat taste like nothing in the world.

  We ate the chops and then I went to bed.

  When Doc wasn’t in his office, he wasn’t home, that’s all.

  When practice was light in summer and there’d be nothing else to do, as it happens sometimes to us all, he’d call his coachman and say, Hitch ’em up, Johnny—or Jake, or whoever it might be that was driving for him at the time—and start out, nobody at first knew whither.

  Where are we headin’, Doc?

  He nodded to the left, down the hill.

  It was a clear June day—the kids were still in school—about two in the afternoon. John let the horses jog lazily down the macadam.

  Someone hailed him: Well, Doc, where you sneakin’ off to? Swimmin’? The Doc gave the man a broad wink as much as to say: Go to hell.

  Down near the track there was a bunch of willows by the ice house where the road turns before straightening out to go through the cat-tails. Maybe he saw them, maybe he didn’t, you never knew.

  Hello, Doc. Where ye goin’?

  He just nodded his head. They just smiled and nodded in reply.

  Killy-fish rippled the road ditch, a diminutive tempest, as the carriage and the hoof beats of the horses slightly shook the ground in passing.

  Without further sign from the Doc, John turned to the left at Mooney’s halfway house and continued up the road. Along this road, so I have been told—and the house is still there—lived a woman who kept a regular hangout for Rivers. It might have been a common joint, I don’t know, but that isn’t the way I heard it.

  Certainly it was in an unusually isolated location, one of the old places, like the mansions on the hill only smaller, more suitable to farming. She was a descendant of the original builders.

  Hello, Jimmie, how are you? Come in, bring your cigar with you.

  That’s the way it began. That’s the way it always began. He would be just starting a stogie.

  Hello, Doc, how’s the boy? would say her brother. He ran the farm for her since her husband walked out.

  I hope he’s sunk in the mud, was all she’d say when that subject came up for comment.

  By this time John would have turned the horses around and be on his way home.

  The house is still there in much the same condition as formerly, quite close to the road with the farm buildings piled up in the rear, mostly given over to pigeons now. Rivers was known to about live there at one time.

  Anyhow, you could see the chickens walking around in the yard all day. They had a colored man who had grown up on the place to take care of the few remnants of the garden that still remained; he went by the windows toward the middle of the afternoon and you could hear him call the chickens and see them run.

  What could the attraction have been? Just one thing. Someone else, something else, to take him out of it. She was a good drinker. She gave him a rest.

  But certainly she had, and I guess he knew it pretty well too, quite a bit put away. You know how these old farmers sometimes are. The increase in land valuations grow to be enormous; they have no need to move to become wealthy selling off sections of the original farm to the Polacks and promoters. She was one of those, hearing of cities and seeing trains crawling right before their eyes night and day, who remain isolated—peculiarly childish. Hot and eccentric.

  Rivers would find an abandoned corner like that to wander into.

  The drink alone would have been enough in itself to attract him. But she was a woman. The loafers around the bar at Donnelley’s were all right. She was a woman. Maybe he never thought much of that but she was just the same.

  Plenty of woman.

  His sensitiveness, his refinement, his delicacy—found perhaps a release in this backhanded fashion. Can you believe it?

  Jesus, she could put up a fight if she wanted to.

  She didn’t give a good God damn for the whole blankin’ world—if you could believe her when she was drunk. And she said it—many times—to her brother and the Doc who put her to bed before he went home.

  Then he’d have to come back next day and get her out of it—if they could find him. That’s how they came to call him the first time.

  Come on, Jimmie, let’s get married, she would say.

  Sure, where’s the priest? and you could tell by his voice that you wouldn’t ask him that many times before you wouldn’t see him again ever.

  Then he quit her. They’d drunk up all her booze, or her brother put a stop to the affair but, anyway, he quit.

  I saw her just once many years later when she was completely abandoned.

  It was the night we had her up at the Police Station for running through the gates at the railroad crossing. There were five in the car. It was a marvel the train didn’t crash them. I was police physician at that time. They wanted me to pass on her, whether or not she was drunk.

  She shoved her face close up against mine and yelled at me: Have you a sister, have you a brother? Then tell me I’m drunk. Her breath reeked half across the room. Look at me! Then she went off into an unrepeatable string of filth and profanity.
And that’s what I think of youse. I said it. You heard me.

  It was the first and only time I saw her—if indeed she was the one of whom I had heard spoken. She must, at least, have been a good bit more attractive formerly.

  As far as I know, he took all the ordinary hypnotics—morphine, heroin and cocaine also. What dose he ever got up to, it’s hard to say. I’ve seen three grains of morphine do no more than make a woman—lying in a maternity ward—normally quiet.

  Of course, it got him finally; he began to slip badly in the latter years, made pitiful blunders. But this final phase was marked by that curious idolatry that sometimes attracts people to a man by the very danger of his name. It lived again in the way many people, not all, still clung to Rivers the more he went down and down.

  They seemed to recreate him in their minds, the beloved scapegoat of their own aberrant desires—and believed that he alone could cure them.

  He became a legend and indulged himself the more.

  But he did do awful things. It is said that he had made the remark that all a woman needed was half her organs—the others were just a surgeon’s opportunity. Half the girls of Creston were without the half of theirs, through his offices, if you could believe his story.

  It amused me to hear Jack Hardt describe how old Rivers would drop in at their tiny farm out in the reeds along the turnpike by the cedar swamp; a very small place, just a few feet of ground rescued from the bog with room only for a chicken coop, a doghouse, a barn and a hay rick. The old man used to make a fairly decent living off it, though, formerly, selling salt hay. I remember Jack’s telling me how the hired men would sleep on the hay in winter with the snow seeping through on them between the boards and the one in the middle sweating from the body heat of his companions.

  Rivers was a frequent caller at that place and always welcome there. The boy knew him well. The Doc would go out into the old privy they had at the back of the yard and stay there for an hour or more sometimes. The kids would go out and peep at him asleep on the seat.

  He’d do the same anywhere. One woman up on the hill who did not know him well had him in to see her. He asked if she had a spare room with a bed in it. She said, Yes, not thinking what was in his mind. He went in and stayed. She was frightened to death. She frantically called up several friends but she could interest no one. Rivers had lain down on the bed and there he slept until nearly five in the afternoon, when his man called to fetch him.

  The man knew to a dot when to come. In the morning after Rivers failed to show up, he had simply driven off. When the drug had worn itself out, he was there.

  Rivers just got up, said nothing, and went home.

  Sometimes, though, it was not so harmless.

  How did he get away with it?

  It is a little inherent in medicine itself—mystery, necromancy, cures—charms of all sorts, and he knew and practiced this black art. Toward the last of his life he had a crooked eye and was thought to be somewhat touched.

  An impressionable lady once caused him an unpleasant half hour because of these things. It appears that he had for some reason taken a flier with her in hypnotism and unexpectedly succeeded in putting her under. But he could not rouse her to normal consciousness again when he was through with the experiment and finally becoming himself frightened, called frantically for his friend Willie to come down and help him get her out of the office. The two men, no doubt as mystified as the patient herself at the turn of affairs, were thoroughly scared before—after great efforts—they succeeded in bringing the lady to herself once more.

  My wife remembers him staring in at our front door through the screen. He had come to ask if I had any death certificates. She couldn’t tell which eye was looking at her. But she noted the wistfulness of his stoop, his eager smile, his voice, his gestures. She felt sorry for him.

  But most feared him—in short, dared not attack him even when they knew he had really killed someone.

  A cure for disease? He knew what that amounted to. For of what shall one be cured? Work, in this case, through sheer intuitive ability flooded him under. Drugs righted him.

  Frightened, under stress, the heart beats faster, the blood is driven to the extremities of the nerves, floods the centers of action and a man feels in a flame. That’s what Rivers wanted, must have wanted. The reaction from such a state required its tonics also.

  That awful fever of overwork which we feel especially in the United States—he had it. A trembling in the arms and thighs, a tightness of the neck and in the head above the eyes—fast breath, vague pains in the muscles and in the feet. Followed by an orgasm, crashing the job through, putting it over in a fever heat. Then the feeling of looseness afterward. Not pleasant. But there it is. Then cigarettes, a shot of gin. And that’s all there is to it. Women the same, more and more.

  He had no time, had to be fast, he had to improvise and did—to a marvel.

  When a street laborer was clipped once by a trolley car, his arm almost severed near the shoulder, Rivers was the first to get there. Such cases were always his particular delight. With one look he took in the situation as usual, made up his mind, and remarking that the arm could be of no possible further use to the man, amputated it there and then—with a pair of bandage scissors.

  Such deeds took the popular fancy and the rumor of them spread like magic.

  It’s funny too, the answer of the Sisters in the hospital when some of the doctors wanted to prevent him from operating there—principally because he would pass out, finally, in the middle of a case and someone else would have to go in and clean it up for him. The Sisters would say in reply to such complainers: What do you wish us to do? So long as people go to the man, we will keep a bed free for them here. Do you want us to go back on them?

  It was an unanswerable argument.

  He was one of the few that ever in these parts knew the meaning of all, to give himself completely. He never asked why, never gave a damn, never thought there was anything else. He was like that, things had an absolute value for him.

  But one of the younger doctors, a first-rate physician who began practicing in the town a month or two prior to my own arrival, had it in for Rivers. My wife would sometimes say to me, If you know he is killing people, why do you doctors not get together and have his license taken away from him?

  I would answer that I didn’t know. I doubted that we could prove anything. No one wanted to try.

  Dr. Grimley, though, did want to do something that day.

  He had had a Hungarian girl, who was scared as hell of the knife, under his care with a strangulated hernia. Grimley tried his best to reduce it but without success. He knew the danger and urged her by every means at his command to go to the hospital and have the operation. She refused.

  He very properly told her that, unless she did as he told her, he would no longer handle the case and that she would die.

  The next day she called him again. As soon as he entered the room, he could see that it was all over. She had called in Rivers. He had told her that he could cure her. God knows what condition he was in at the time. He pressed upon the sac until it burst. The next day she died.

  Grimley was wild. I met him at the corner by the drug store. Though a very quiet man he was fairly foaming at the mouth. He wanted to have Rivers arrested, he wanted to have him prosecuted for malpractice and to put him out of the way once and for all—said he’d do it.

  He never did.

  In reality, it was a population in despair, out of hand, out of discipline, driven about by each other blindly, believing in the miraculous, the drunken, as it may be. Here was, to many, though they are diminishing fast, something before which they could worship, a local shrine, all there was left, a measure of the poverty which surrounded them. They believed in him: Rivers, drunk or sober. It is a plaintive, failing story.

  Typical of their behavior is the tale of a very sober and canny butcher whom I know well who had a small daughter that had what seemed to me to be typical epileptic fits. They c
alled me in and I told the parents there was little I could do for them.

  Later I saw them again and they confessed to me frankly that they had taken the child to Dr. Rivers. I wished them luck.

  A year later, I had occasion to talk to them again of the child. She had not had a convulsion for several months. Rivers had cured her. How, I do not know.

  Yes, the father said, it took us quite a while to get him working but once he really got his mind down on the case, it didn’t take him long till he had her where he wanted her. They believed it and it was so.

  People sought him out, they’d wait months for him finally—though he did, of his own volition, give up maternity cases toward the end. When everyone else failed, they believed he’d see them through: a powerful fetish. He would save them.

  The end was recounted to me by a young patient of mine, a teller in the bank. His father had always had Rivers. So when the old man fell and broke his arm, they called up the Doc who came and deliberately hopped himself up right before the patient—undisguisedly, so indifferent had he become.

  That finished it. It was the look in his eyes. He’s crazy, said the patient. Take him away. I don’t want him fooling around me. I’ll get another doctor.

  But it would not be just to say that this was really the end, for that gives a wrong impression. Rivers was through, yes, in some ways, but he did not quit by any means. The truth is that during his last years he bought a good-sized lot on the square before the Municipal Building in the center of town. Here he built a fine house, had a large garden, lawns and a double garage, where he kept two cars always ready for service.

  Here he continued to practice for several years while his wife bred small dogs—Blue Poms, I think, for her amusement and for sale, one or more of which Rivers would often take out in the car with him on his calls, holding them on his lap, for in those days he himself never sat at the wheel.