The Doctor Stories

by William Carlos Williams

I hardly think so, I said looking over the legs again, one of which I held on the palm of either hand. No, I don’t think so.

  What is it then? It hurts her bad, especially at night.

  She’s bow-legged as hell in the first place. That throws the strain where it doesn’t belong and look at these shoes—

  Yeah, I know.

  The woman had on an old pair of fancy high-heeled slippers such as a woman might put on for evening wear. They were all worn and incredibly broken down. I don’t see how she can walk in them.

  That’s what I told her, the man said. I wanted her to get a pair of shoes that fitted her but she wouldn’t do it.

  Well, she’s got to do it, I said. Throw away those shoes, I told her, and get shoes with flat heels. And straight heels. I tried to impress her. What they call Cuban heels, if you must. New shoes, I emphasized. How old is she, I asked the man.

  His face colored again for reasons I could not fathom. Twenty-four, he said.

  Where was she born?

  In Poland.

  In Poland! Well. I looked at her, not believing him.

  Yeah, why?

  Well. Twenty-four years old you say. Let’s see. That’s different. An unusual type for a Jew, I thought. That’s the probable explanation for her legs, I told the husband. She must have been a little girl during the war over there. A kid of maybe five or six years I should imagine. Is that right, I asked her. But she didn’t answer me, just looked back into my eyes with that inane look.

  What did you get to eat?

  She seemed not to have heard me but turned to her husband.

  Did she lose any of her people, I asked him.

  Any of them? She lost everybody, he said quietly.

  How did she come to get over here then?

  She came over four years ago. She has a sister over here.

  So that’s it, I thought to myself looking at her fussing, intensely absorbed with the baby, looking at it, talking to it in an inarticulate sort of way, paying no attention whatever to me. No wonder she’s built the way she is, considering what she must have been through in that invaded territory. And this guy here—

  What are we going to do about the pains, Doc?

  Get her some decent shoes, that’s the first thing.

  O.K., Doc.

  She could be operated on for those veins. But I wouldn’t advise it, just yet. I tell you. Get one of those woven elastic bandages for her, they don’t cost much. A three inch one. And I told him what to get.

  Can’t you give her some pills to stop the pain?

  Not me, I told him. You might get her teeth looked at though if you want to. All that kind of thing and—well, I will give you something. It’s not dope. It just helps if there’s any rheumatism connected with it.

  Can you swallow a pill, I turned to her attracting her attention.

  She looked at me. How big? she said.

  She swallows an Aspirin pill when I give it to her sometimes, said her husband, but she usually puts it in a spoonful of water first to dissolve it. His face reddened again and suddenly I understood his half shameful love for the woman and at the same time the extent of her reliance on him.

  I was touched.

  They’re pretty big pills, I said. Look, they’re green. That’s the coating so they won’t dissolve in your stomach and upset your digestion.

  Let see, said the woman.

  I showed a few of the pills to her in the palm of my hand.

  For pains in leg?

  Yes, I told her.

  She looked at them again. Then for the first time since I had known her a broad smile spread all over her face. Yeah, she said, I swallow him.

  Danse Pseudomacabre

  THAT WHICH IS POSSIBLE is inevitable. I defend the normality of every distortion to which the flesh is susceptible, every disease, every amputation. I challenge anyone who thinks to discomfit my intelligence by limiting the import of what I say to the expounding of a shallow morbidity, to prove that health alone is inevitable. Until he can do that his attack upon me will be imbecilic.

  Allons! Commençons la danse.

  The telephone is ringing. I have awakened sitting erect in bed, unsurprised, almost uninterested, but with an overwhelming sense of death pressing my chest together as if I had come reluctant from the grave to which a distorted homesickness continued to drag me, a sense as of the end of everything. My wife lies asleep, curled against her pillow. Christ, Christ! how can I ever bear to be separated from this my boon companion, to be annihilated, to have her annihilated? How can a man live in the face of this daily uncertainty? How can a man not go mad with grief, with apprehension?

  I wonder what time it is. There is a taxi just leaving the club. Tang, tang, tang. Finality. Three o’clock.

  The moon is low, its silent flame almost level among the trees, across the budding rose garden, upon the grass.

  The streets are illumined with the moon and the useless flares of the purple and yellow street lamps hanging from the dark each above its little circular garden of flowers.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry! Upstairs! He’s dying! Oh my God! my God, what will I do without him? I won’t live! I won’t—I won’t—

  What a face! Erysipelas. Doesn’t look so bad—in a few days the moon will be full.

  Quick! Witness this signature—It’s his will—A great blubber of a thirty-year-old male seated, hanging, floating erect in the center of the sagging double-bed spring, his long hair in a mild mass, his body wrapped in a downy brown wool dressing gown, a cord around the belly, a great pudding face, the whole right side of it a dirty purple, swollen, covered with watery blebs, the right eye swollen shut. He is trembling, wildly excited—a paper on his unsteady knees, a fountain pen in his hand. Witness this signature! Will it be legal? Yes, of course. He signs. I sign after him. When the Scotch go crazy they are worse than a Latin. The nose uninvolved. What a small nose.

  My God, I’m done for.

  Oh my God, what will I do without him?

  Kindly be quiet, madam. What sort of way is that to talk in a sickroom? Do you want to kill him? Give him a chance, if you please.

  Is he going to die, doctor? He’s only been sick a few days. His eye started to close yesterday. He’s never been sick in his life. He has no one but his father and me. Oh, I won’t live without him.

  Of course when a man as full-blooded as he is has erysipelas—

  Do you think it’s erysipelas?

  How much does he weigh?

  Two hundred and forty pounds.

  Temperature 102. That’s not bad.

  He won’t die? Are you kidding me, doctor?

  What for? The moon has sunk. Almost no more at all. Only the Scotch have such small noses. Follow these directions. I have written down what you are to do.

  Again the moon. Again. And why not again? It is a dance. Everything that varies a hair’s breadth from another is an invitation to the dance. Either dance or annihilation. There can be only the dance or ONE. So, the next night, I enter another house. And so I repeat the trouble of writing that which I have already written, and so drag another human being from oblivion to serve my music.

  It is a baby. There is a light at the end of a broken corridor. A man in a pointed beard leads the way. Strong foreign accent. Holland Dutch. We walk through the corridor to the back of the house. The kitchen. In the kitchen turn to the right. Someone is sitting back of the bedroom door. A nose, an eye emerge, sniffing and staring, a wrinkled nose, a cavernous eye. Turn again to the right through another door and walk toward the front of the house. We are in a sickroom. A bed has been backed against the corridor entry making this detour necessary.

  Oh, here you are, doctor. British. The nurse I suppose.

  The baby is in a smother of sheets and crumpled blankets, its head on a pillow. The child’s left eye closed, its right partly opened. It emits a soft whining cry continuously at every breath. It can’t be more than a few weeks old.

  Do you think it is unconscious, doctor?

>   Yes.

  Will it live? It is the mother. A great tender-eyed blonde. Great full breasts. A soft gentle-minded woman of no mean beauty. A blue cotton house wrapper, shoulder to ankle.

  If it lives it will be an idiot perhaps. Or it will be paralysed—or both. It is better for it to die.

  There it goes now! The whining has stopped. The lips are blue. The mouth puckers as for some diabolic kiss. It twitches, twitches faster and faster, up and down. The body slowly grows rigid and begins to fold itself like a flower folding again. The left eye opens slowly, the eyeball is turned so the pupil is lost in the angle of the nose. The right eye remains open and fixed staring forward. Meningitis. Acute. The arms are slowly raised more and more from the sides as if in the deliberate attitude before a mad dance, hands clenched, wrists flexed. The arms now lie upon each other crossed at the wrists. The knees are drawn up as if the child were squatting. The body holds this posture, the child’s belly rumbling with a huge contortion. Breath has stopped. The body is stiff, blue. Slowly it relaxes, the whimpering cry begins again. The left eye falls closed.

  It began with that eye. It was a lovely baby. Normal in every way. Breast fed. I have not taken it anywhere. It is only six weeks old. How can he get it?

  The pointed beard approaches. It is infection, is it not, doctor?

  Yes.

  But I took him nowhere. How could he get it?

  He must have gotten it from someone who carries it, maybe from one of you.

  Will he die?

  Yes, I think so.

  Oh, I pray God to take him.

  Have you any other children?

  One girl five, and this boy.

  Well, one must wait.

  Again the night. The beard has followed me to the door. He closes the door carefully. We are alone in the night.

  It is an infection?

  Yes.

  My wife is Catholic—not I. She had him for baptism. They pour water from a can on his head, so. It runs down in front of him, there where they baptize all kinds of babies, into his eye perhaps. It is a funny thing.

  The Paid Nurse

  WHEN I CAME IN, approaching eleven o’clock Sunday evening, there had been a phone call for me. I don’t know what it is, Mrs. Corcoran called up, said Floss, about an accident of some sort that happened to George. You know, Andy’s friend. What kind of an accident? An explosion, I don’t know, something like that, I couldn’t make it out. He wants to come up and see you. She’ll call back in a minute or two.

  As I sat down to finish the morning paper the phone rang again as usual. His girl friend had heard about it and was taking him up to her doctor in Norwood. Swell.

  But next day he came to see me anyhow. What in hell’s happened to you, George? I said when I saw him. His right arm was bandaged to the shoulder, the crook of his left elbow looked like overdone bacon, his lips were blistered, his nose was shiny with grease and swollen out of shape and his right ear was red and thickened.

  They want me to go back to work, he said. They told me if I didn’t go back I wouldn’t get paid. I want to see you.

  What happened?

  I work for the General Bearings Company, in Jersey City. You know what that means. They’re a hard-boiled outfit. I’m not kidding myself about that, but they can’t make me work the way I feel. Do you think I have to work with my arms like this? I want your opinion. That fellow in Norwood said it wasn’t anything but I couldn’t sleep last night, I was in agony. He gave me two capsules and told me to take one. I took one around three o’clock and that just made me feel worse. I tried to go back this morning but I couldn’t do it.

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. You haven’t told me what happened yet.

  Well, they had me cleaning some metal discs. It wasn’t my regular job. So I asked the boss, What is this stuff? Benzol, he said. It is inflammable? I said. Not very, he said. We use it here all the time. I didn’t believe him right then because I could smell it, it had a kind of smell like gasoline or cleaning fluid of some kind.

  What I had to do was to pick those pieces out of a pail of the stuff on this side of me, my left side, and turn and place them in the oven to dry them. Two hundred degrees temperature in there. Then I’d turn and pick up another lot and so on into the dryer and back again. I had on long rubber gauntlets up almost to my elbow.

  Well, I hadn’t hardly started when, blup! it happened. I didn’t know what it was at first. You know you don’t realize those things right away—until I smelt burnt hair and cloth and saw my gloves blazing. The front of my shirt was burning too—lucky it wasn’t soaked with the stuff. I jumped back into the aisle and put my hands back of me and shook the gloves off on the floor. The pail was blazing too.

  Everybody came on the run and rushed me into the emergency room. Everybody was excited, but as soon as they saw that I could see and wasn’t going to pass out on them they went back to their jobs and left me there with the nurse to fix me up.

  Then I began to feel it. The flames from the shirt must have come up into my face because inside my nostrils was burnt and you can see what it did to my eyebrows and eyelashes. She called the doctor but he didn’t come any nearer than six feet from me. That’s not very bad, he said. So the nurse put a little dressing, of tannic acid, I think she said it was, on my right arm which got the worst of it. I was just turning away from the oven when it happened, lucky for me, so I got it mostly on my right side.

  What do I do now? I asked her. Go home? I was feeling rotten.

  No, of course not, she told me. That’s not bad. Go on back to work.

  What! I said.

  Yes, she said. And come back tomorrow morning. If you don’t you won’t get paid. And, by the way, she said, don’t go to any other doctor. You come back here tomorrow morning and go to work as usual. Do you think that was right?

  The bastards. Go ahead. Wasn’t there someone you could appeal to there? Don’t you belong to a union?

  No, said George. There’s nothing like that there. Only the teamsters and the pressmen have unions, they’ve had them long enough so that the company can’t interfere.

  All right. Go ahead.

  So I went back to the job. They gave me something else to do but the pain got so bad I couldn’t stand it so I told the boss I had to quit. All right, he said, go on home but be back here tomorrow morning. That would be today.

  You went back this morning?

  I couldn’t sleep all night. Look at my arm.

  All right. Let’s look at it. The worst was the right elbow and forearm, almost to the shoulder in fact. It was cooked to about the color of ham rind with several areas where the Norwood doctor had opened several large blisters the night before. The arm was, besides that, swollen to a size at least a third greater than its normal volume and had begun to turn a deep, purplish red just above the wrist. The ear and nose were not too bad but in all the boy looked sick.

  So you went back this morning?

  Yes.

  Did they dress it?

  No, just looked at it and ordered me on the floor. They gave me a job dragging forty-pound cases from the stack to the elevator. I couldn’t use my right arm so I tried to do it with my left but I couldn’t keep it up. I told ’em I was going home.

  Well?

  The nurse gave me hell. She called me a baby and told me it wasn’t anything. The men work with worse things than that the matter with them every day, she said.

  That don’t make any difference to me, I told her, I’m going home.

  All right, she said, but if you don’t show up here tomorrow for work you don’t get any pay. That’s why I’m here, he continued. I can’t work. What do you say?

  Well, I said, I’ll call up the Senator, which I did at once. And was told, of course, that the man didn’t have to go to work if I said he wasn’t able to do so. They can be reported to the Commission, if necessary. Or better perhaps, I can write them a letter first. You tell him not to go to work.

  You’re not to go to work, I told the
boy. O.K., that settles it. Want to see me tomorrow? Yeah. And quit those damned capsules he gave you, I told him. No damned good. Here, here’s something much simpler that won’t at least leave you walking on your ear till noon the next day. Thanks. See you tomorrow.

  Then it began to happen. Late in the afternoon the nurse called him up to remind him to report for duty next morning. I told her I’d been to you, he said, and that you wanted the compensation papers. She won’t listen to it. She says they’re sending the company car for me tomorrow morning to take me in to see their doctor. Do I go?

  Not on your life.

  But the next day I was making rounds in the hospital at about ten A.M. when the office reached me on one of the floors. Hold the wire. It was George. The car is here and they want me to go back with them. What do I do?

  Wait a minute, I said. What’s their phone number? And what’s that nurse’s name? I’ll talk to them. You wait till I call you back. So I got the nurse and talked to her. I hear you had an explosion down at your plant, I told her. What do you mean? she said. What are you trying to do, cover it up, I asked her, so the insurance company won’t find out about it? We don’t do that sort of thing in this company. What are you doing now? I asked her again. She blurted and bubbled till I lost my temper and let her have it. What is that, what is that? she kept saying. You know what I’m talking about, I told her. Our doctors take care of our own cases, she told me. You mean they stand off six feet from a man and tell him he’s all right when the skin is half-burned off of him and the insides of his nostrils are all scorched? That isn’t true, she said. He had no right to go to an outside doctor. What! I said, when he’s in agony in the middle of the night from the pains of his burns, he has no right to get advice and relief? Is that what you mean? He has the privilege of calling our own doctor if he needs one, she says. In the middle of the night? I asked her. I tell you what you do, I said, you send me the compensation papers to sign. You heard me, I said, and make it snappy if you know what’s good for you. We want our own doctor to see him, she insisted. All right, I said, your own doctor can see him but he’s not to go to work. Get that through your head, I said. And that’s what I told him.