Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  Sheila’s voice, too, was almost unrecognizable as she said, “He doesn’t have one.” Damon recognized a twenty-year-old complaint in the tone of her voice. “And my doctor is a gynecologist.”

  This somehow struck Damon as comic, and bent over as he was above the toilet, he heard himself laugh.

  “I’ll call ours,” Oliver said. “I hope he’s not out of town.”

  “No need.” Damon suddenly felt the pain drain away, his throat no longer in the grip of spasms. “I’m all right.” He straightened up, with dignity put on his robe, which was hanging on the bathroom door. “My stomach’s a little upset. That’s all.” He looked once at Sheila, was grateful that she had had time to put on a robe, then looked away because the set of her eyes and mouth frightened him. “I’ll just lie down and take a little nap.”

  “Don’t be so goddamn spartan,” Sheila said severely as she took his arm and led him back to the bed. Once in bed he felt his muscles relax, his stomach stop churning, the spike of pain disappear. He smiled encouragingly at Oliver and Sheila standing over him. “I’m fine,” he said. “The truth is I’m awfully hungry. Do you think I could have some orange juice and toast and coffee?”

  The doctor was a tall, handsome old man by the name of Brecher, with gray hair and a brisk, no-nonsense manner that inspired confidence. He did not seem to think that the case was too serious. “Just a little rest,” he said, “and a bland diet for a few days, some Maalox before meals, and no worrying”—now he looked severe, as though worrying was one of the worst diseases he had encountered in many years of practicing in the city of New York—“and you should be as good as new.”

  Damon was glad that Oliver had had the good sense to patronize a sensible old-fashioned general practitioner instead of one of the new-fangled technicians who rushed their patients immediately into the hospital and subjected them to the complete gamut of medical torture, including the visits of specialists, each of whom discovered that the poor sufferer was the victim of just the disease which they had been expert at diagnosing since they emerged from medical school. Damon thanked the doctor profusely and assured him that at the moment he was feeling better than he had in months, as Sheila’s face grew grimmer and grimmer, the disbelief in her eyes as plain as a flag snapping in the wind. Relieved by the doctor’s assurance of the insignificance of his illness and the modesty of the treatment he had prescribed, the cloud that had been hovering over Damon’s soul dissipated like a morning mist in sunshine, and he even felt that it was time to end what he now ashamedly thought he recognized as a hypochondriacal weakness and was impatient to be up and around and see to it that his business was not going to rack and ruin under Oliver’s uncertain if devoted direction.

  When the doctor had left, Sheila, who had gone to the door with him, returned, her face grimmer than ever. “You act like a child,” she said to Damon, “a macho little boy in a playground who gets punched in the nose and bleeds all over the place and says it doesn’t hurt. What do you know about yourself—you never even look in the mirror except when you shave. You may be able to snow a doctor; you can’t snow your wife. It hurts and the sooner you admit it the better. You’re sick and all the acting in the world doesn’t convince me. We’ll talk about this when I get back from work this evening.”

  Her deep dark eyes thunderous, she slammed the door as she went out.

  Admirable woman, he thought as he lay back against the pillows. Right or wrong, she doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind.

  But they didn’t talk about his symptoms that afternoon when Sheila returned from work. Sheila came in with her eyes red and swollen, as though she had been crying for hours. Gregor Khodar had called the school after trying to call their apartment and getting no answer. Ebba Khodar had been killed that morning by a bomb hidden in a parked automobile while walking past a bank on a street in Rome. There wasn’t anything identifiable, Gregor had told Sheila, that was worth burying.

  That night, in bed, holding Sheila, mercifully unconscious after a dose of sleeping pills, Damon remembered Lieutenant Schulter’s law of averages. The lieutenant had neglected to include the city of Rome in his statistics.

  With Sheila sleeping in his arms in the darkened room, Damon finally permitted himself to weep. What warnings, Damon wondered in his anguish, anguish for his friend and for himself, had that sweet and simple woman ignored?

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  HE WAS TRYING TO WRITE a letter to Gregor and had already crumpled three sheets of paper and thrown them into the wastebasket and was on the fourth attempt. His brain was numb, all passages blocked, all perceptions fogged over. It was hopeless, he thought, staring down at the sheet of notepaper, to try to put into words what he felt about what had happened in Rome, and he was about to crumple the page when there was a timid knock on the guest room door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “I hate to disturb you, Roger,” Doris said, “but Dr. Brecher’s on the phone and he’d like to talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” Damon said, and followed her out to the hallway, where the phone was on a table. As she went out of the hallway so that he could speak to the doctor without being overheard, he noticed that Doris was fully dressed, in a skirt and sweater, her hair neatly done and makeup in place, although it was only ten o’clock in the morning. Since he and Sheila had been in the Gabrielsens’ apartment he had never seen her in a robe or with her hair ruffled and he realized that this early morning neatness was for his benefit, so that he wouldn’t feel that he was interfering with what might have been a comfortable housewifely disorder. He would have to make it up to her for her tact, he thought. But some other time.

  He picked up the phone. “Dr. Brecher,” he said.

  “Mr. Damon,” the doctor said, “I’ve been thinking about you all night. I have the feeling that you didn’t describe all the symptoms of whatever might be ailing you. For example, when you’ve vomited, has any of it been black?”

  Damon hesitated for a moment. It was true, once or twice he had noticed specks of black, but he had been drinking coffee and attributed the color to that. “Not really,” he said. After what had happened to Ebba Khodar, worrying about a dubious malfunctioning of his own body seemed like a callous frivolity.

  “Please, Mr. Damon,” the doctor said, “this might be very important. I don’t want to sound like a fussy old maid, but often a man like you, who has been in splendid health all his life, has a tendency to pooh-pooh the evidence, to dismiss what he thinks is just a moment of temporary discomfort.

  “Well, Doctor,” Damon said, “now that you mention it, I have seen the kind of thing you mention. Yes, briefly, a few times, not too much. Actually, right now, I don’t feel anything at all.” He was certain that Dr. Brecher, no matter whatever his gifts might be, could not guess how accurate the phrase was.

  “For everybody’s sake,” Dr. Brecher said, “and most particularly for yours, you need a much more thorough examination than I can manage. I am going to make an appointment for you with a Dr. Zinfandel, at the Boylston General Hospital. He is one of the most brilliant diagnosticians in the city and I won’t feel safe until he’s seen you.”

  “It seems like such a fuss about …” Damon stopped. A sudden pain, a hot throbbing in his stomach, made talking difficult, then passed. “Yes, Doctor,” he said, “thank you for your trouble. I’ll see him.”

  “My secretary will call you and tell you when you’re to see Zinfandel. If he finds out it’s nothing, it will put my mind and yours and your wife’s at rest. It will be worth your time.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Damon said, and hung up. He went back into the guest room and sat at the small desk where he had been trying to write the letter to Gregor. He stared at the few words he had managed to get down on paper and was struck by how strange his handwriting seemed, shaky and almost illegible. With his elbows on the desk he cupped his head in his hands and shut his eyes.

  The next morning he was in the Boylston General Hospit
al in the heart of Manhattan. The hospital spread over so much of the city and was so large that it looked as though, if every bed were filled within its towering stone walls, there should be nobody up and around and unafflicted by one disease or another in the streets of the city.

  He was in Dr. Zinfandel’s office, feeling a little foolish because he had had no further attacks of anything for more than twenty-four hours. He had almost decided to cancel his appointment, but when he told that to Sheila the grim look on her face had made him realize that he would have no peace with her as long as he insisted there was no reason to submit to examination. Oliver, too, had gotten into the act and had called his brother, who was a surgeon in the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and had Dr. Brecher’s high estimate of Zinfandel confirmed.

  Dr. Zinfandel was a small, blondish, sharp-nosed, intense man, an implacable and tireless tracker among the jungles of hidden maladies. His questioning was thorough. At what intervals did the pain occur? Blood by oral passage? Bowel movements? Measles at what age? What did your mother die of? Your father? Have you ever had hepatitis? Are you allergic to penicillin? How many times during the night do you have to get out of bed to urinate? Have you ever had syphilis? Gonorrhea? Do you pant when you climb stairs? Have you lost or gained weight recently? How many times a week do you engage in sexual intercourse? A month? What operations have you had? Do you have a yearly medical checkup? When was the last time before this … ah … episode that you visited a doctor? Ah, twenty-five years or so ago? Eyebrows lifted in surprise, disapproval. The pen in Dr. Zinfandel’s hand scribbled swiftly on the chart he was filling out. Do you have Medicare or Medicaid? When did you first become aware of the pain? Describe it, please. What are your eating habits? Do you have a penchant for spicy foods—pickles, chili, pastrami? How would you describe your drinking habits?

  “Moderate.”

  Dr. Zinfandel smiled wearily, showing that he had heard this description many times in his professional career, from sots, men who took a bracer of a full tumbler of gin upon rising in the morning, from patients who had been hospitalized for delirium tremens and others who had been discharged from responsible positions because of five-martini lunches followed by three snifters of brandy.

  “What do you consider moderate, Mr. Damon?”

  “A couple of Scotches before dinner, a half-bottle of wine with dinner, an occasional party.”

  The smile grew crooked, the hand scribbled faster. Later, Damon discovered that Dr. Zinfandel, despite his name, which described the variety of grape from which a glorious wine was made, was a fanatic teetotaler, with all the loathing of alcohol of an only son who had seen his mother and father lying in the gutter sodden with drink.

  “Let us go on. Have you been under any exceptional stress recently?”

  Damon hesitated. He wondered if a great diagnostician of internal disorders would describe an attempt at murder, the bombing of one of his best friends’ wife, which after all were external disorders, as worthy of mention as exceptional stress. “Yes,” he said, hoping the good doctor would leave it at that.

  “Physical? Mental?” The good doctor, Damon could see, was not in the habit of leaving anything at that.

  “I suppose you could call it both,” Damon said. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it.” He did not want to relive the moments when the shots boomed in the dark narrow street, when Weinstein fell and the drunk called in agony as he collapsed to the pavement. “It was all in the papers.”

  “I’m afraid I’m too busy to read the papers carefully.” Dr. Zinfandel pursed his lips, pleased with his business.

  “Let’s say great stress,” Damon said.

  Dr. Zinfandel looked back over what he had written, scanning the chart swiftly. He seemed to have come to the end of his list of inquiries. There were still questions he might have asked, Damon thought. Such as, What is the state of your soul, Sir? Have you sinned? Was there at the time of your brother’s death, mixed with your infantile grief, a sense of joy that now you were the only son and would receive the undivided love and attention of your mother and father? Do you believe in dreams, fate, the supernatural? Do you consider yourself a lucky or an unlucky man? At what age would you consider it fitting to die? Do you cheat on your income tax? Are you worried about money? Where would you prefer to be when a nuclear war is begun? You say you never have been wounded. Do you really believe that? Is there, in your opinion, a God? If you believe that, do you think that Ebba Khodar’s death on a Roman street was part of God’s plan for humanity? Do you believe that coming events cast their shadow before? Do you agree with the poet when he says, “Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come”?

  Damon watched the doctor closely as Zinfandel frowned, his nose twitching, while his eyes, like a radar scanner, ran over what he had written. He seemed displeased with what Damon’s answers indicated to his trained professional mind.

  “Actually,” Damon said, “right now I feel perfectly healthy.”

  The doctor nodded impatiently. He had heard that story before. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that it is not as trivial as you think. The only way we can be sure of anything is by putting you through a complete examination—X-rays, CAT scan, a cardiogram, blood tests, gallbladder, liver, lungs, kidneys, urine and feces samples, etcetera, several days of close surveillance. I would like to show the X-rays and the results of the tests to a surgeon.”

  “A surgeon?” Damon felt a sudden dryness in his mouth. “What would I need a surgeon for?”

  “It’s always better to be on the safe side,” Zinfandel said smoothly. “Cover all avenues, as it were. With all our machines, diagnostic techniques, sometimes the only way we can be sure is by going in.”

  At least, Damon thought, he didn’t say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

  “I don’t want to alarm you,” Zinfandel said soothingly. “The surgeon would only be held in reserve, as it were.”

  If he says as it were once more, Damon thought, I’m getting up and leaving this office.

  “Do you have a surgeon who is a specialist in internal medicine whom you’ have faith in?” Zinfandel asked, his pencil poised to put down a name.

  “No.” Damon felt a little ashamed to have to admit that upwardly mobile as he had proved to be in his career he had neglected an important cultural accessory like a personal surgeon.

  “I would suggest Dr. Rogarth then,” Dr. Zinfandel said. “He is preeminent in his field and he operates here. Do you object if I call him in on your case?”

  “I am in your hands, Doctor,” Damon said humbly, thinking, This place is overrun with preeminence.

  “Good. Can you be prepared to come into the hospital tomorrow at noon?”

  “Whenever you say.”

  “Do you want a private room?”

  “Yes.” Good old Threnody, Damon thought. Before its publication he would have asked for the cheapest bed in the hospital. Wealth had its advantages. You could suffer without witnesses and whatever groans you heard would be your own.

  “Be prepared to stay a minimum of three days.” Dr. Zinfandel stood up. The interview was over. He extended his hand as Damon stood, too. When they shook hands, Damon was surprised by the tension in the doctor’s grasp, as though his hand were attached to his arm by live electric wires. When he got to know Dr. Zinfandel better, Damon thought as he left the office, he would have a long list of questions of his own to ask the doctor about his health.

  Five days later he was in the pleasant private room being prepared for an operation at seven o’clock the next morning on what the surgeon and Dr. Zinfandel had agreed might very likely be a severe intestinal ulcer. The tests had been dismaying. Dr. Zinfandel’s hunch had been correct and his and the surgeon’s warnings about the consequences of postponing the operation had been dire.

  Oliver had called his brother again and his brother had said that the surgeon, Dr. Rogarth, had an excellent reputation. When Oliver had told him this, Dam
on had smiled wryly and asked Oliver if he remembered his speech about never having had a sick day in his life. “It taught me a lesson,” Damon said. “The gods don’t like boasting.” He tried to seem calm and take everything lightly, but he was panicky and he didn’t like the feeling. Everything has been leading up to this, he thought, everything since the goddamn telephone call.

  Dr. Rogarth was not panicky. Corpulent, rosy-cheeked, dressed in pearly gray, he flowed into the room, a broad, slow-moving Mississippi of a man, his gestures deliberate and papal, his speech unhurried and measured. He had soft, pudgy hands, not what one would expect in a preeminent surgeon. He sat himself down on a straight chair beside the bed. “I have explained the procedure to Mrs. Damon,” he said. “I believe that she shares my confidence that all will go well. The anesthetist who examined you foresees no great difficulties. I expect you will be back in this room when you emerge from the recovery room after the operation, four or five hours after you have left it for the operating theatre.” He recited all this as though he had learned it in a manual and could repeat it a thousand times, on his own deathbed if necessary. “If you have any questions, I would be pleased to answer them to the best of my ability.”

  “Yes,” Damon said, “I have a question. When will I be able to go home?”

  A sad little smile fleetingly appeared on the full, girlishly curved lips, like a ripple sweeping placidly across the broad surface of the waters. People for whom the doctor wished well and to whose welfare he dedicated most of his life were always anxious to leave him at the first opportunity for flight, the smile said. “It is impossible to be exact in these matters. I would guess twelve, fifteen days, depending on your powers of recovery. Do you have any other questions?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Rogarth stood up, straightened the pearl-gray vest over his comfortable stomach. “I suggest you eat nothing after five P.M. today. An orderly will be in to shave your chest and give you an enema this evening and you will be sedated for the night. In the morning the nurse will give you a shot before you leave this room and you’ll probably be asleep before you’re wheeled to the elevator. I trust you have a good night, Sir.”