"How's the patient?" he said.
"The patient is all right," the float said. "Dr. Halloran is still standing there with his finger in it."
"How's Dr. Halloran feeling?"
"He's fine, too. He was hungry, so I got him a sandwich and a container of milk."
The absurdity of Halloran standing there with the float feeding him a sandwich and milk and Halloran holding his finger in the pulmonary artery struck him.
"What kind of a sandwich was it?" he said.
"It was a cream cheese sandwich," the float said, serious. "That's what he wanted."
"Good," he said, "that's prescribed in cases like this. Tell him I'm in a traffic jam on my side of the bridge. If it doesn't start to move soon I'll walk across the bridge and get the police to bring me in. I'll be there soon."
When he went out the sleet had lessened and was starting to turn to rain. He could see the boom of a crane on the bridge, and in ten minutes the traffic began to move into the funnel neck that was the cleared lane. In another thirty-five minutes he was at the hospital.
"How's he doing?" he said, looking in at the O.R. door.
"All right," Halloran said, standing there, his right hand hidden in the chest cavity and looking foolish and embarrassed.
"How are you feeling?"
"Stupid and tired," Halloran said.
"I'll be right in."
He got into a scrub suit and scrubbed again.
"What happened?" he said to Halloran.
"I was irrigating with the saline," Halloran said, "and I saw this black speck. I thought it was a fleck of carbon off the light, so I reached down with the forceps to pick it up. It was the frayed end of the silk tie, and it came off. When it did, the vessel retracted out of sight, so I reached down to locate it. When I put my finger down to stop the bleeding it went right into the artery, and here I am three hours later."
"Let me take a look," he said.
He knew he could get at the artery at its source, so he opened the pericardium, which is the covering over the heart, and went inside of it and clamped the artery there. Then Halloran found the artery and brought it into view and tied it off.
He had been driving to Veterans' for about four years when he realized he was always stopping, on the way back, at the same Esso station on the right-hand side of the road and just before the bridge. It was a one-man business with just two pumps, and over the door of the one-room gray clapboard building adjoining the garage with the grease-pit in it, was a board painted white with black lettering that read: J. S. Stanczyk.
"Fill it up, Doctor?" J. S. Stanczyk said to him one day.
"Yes," he said, "but don't put so much water in with it this time."
"Water?" J. S. Stanczyk said, then looking at his face and getting it. "Oh, yes. Well, you see, Doctor, that's the way I have to make my profit until the customer gets wise."
"I figured that," he said.
That was the way he got to know J. S. Stanczyk. J. S. Stanczyk and his wife lived in a white Cape Cod cottage on the hI'll behind the gas station. There was a field-stone path that led up to it and a rose arbor over the walk near the front door, and from the cottage they could look down over the green slope of Wendell's Evergreen Nursery to their right and they could see the river and the bridge.
"You know what you ought to do?" he said to J. S. Stanczyk one day.
While J. S. Stanczyk had been filling the tank he had walked into the station and, because he was hungry but had no time to eat, he had taken a Coke out of the machine. He was finishing the Coke when J. S. Stanczyk came in, wiping his hands on a rag and looking at the black under his nails.
"What?" he said.
"Expand your establishment. Put in a lunch counter."
"No, thanks," J. S. Stanczyk said.
"Why not? Then a busy man who has no time to stop for lunch could grab a sandwich while you're servicing his car."
"You hungry, Doctor?"
"I am today, but I haven't got any time to eat."
"You gonna do another operation now without eatin'?"
"I do that all the time."
"If I'd known that," J. S. Stanczyk said, "I woulda had my wife put a couple of extra sandwiches in my lunch box."
"That's very nice of you," he said, "but this Coke will fix me up fine."
The first Tuesday of the next month, when he stopped at the station again, J. S. Stanczyk was putting oil into a car standing at one side of the pumps. It was raining hard, the water running off the brim of his old fedora hat when he bent over the engine and the rain beating at his yellow slicker.
"If you've got a minute, Doctor," he said, when he had come over and had motioned for him to put the window down, "would you mind stepping into the place?"
He followed J. S. Stanczyk into the station. J. S. Stanczyk took his black lunch box down from beside the cash register and opened it and took out two sandwiches, wrapped in waxed paper, and handed them to him.
"Here," he said. "Have some lunch with your Coke."
"Wait a minute. I don't want to be eating your lunch."
"It's not mine. My wife put in two extra for you."
"That's very nice of her, and it's nice of you, too."
"Enjoy it while I'm fillin' your car."
There was a ham sandwich and the second was Swiss cheese. As he was starting on the Swiss cheese J. S. Stanczyk came in, shaking the water off his fedora and taking off his slicker and shaking it before he hung it up.
"How are the sandwiches?" he said.
"They're great, but your wife shouldn't have bothered."
"No bother."
"What do I owe you?"
"It took four dollars and thirty cents' worth, Doctor."
"And how much are the sandwiches?"
"No charge for the sandwiches. It's our pleasure."
"Oh, come on, now. Let's be reasonable. I want to pay for these. I don't want any favors."
"Look, Doctor," J. S. Stanczyk said, "every time you help some sick person you're doin' them a favor. The least we can do is a little favor like this for you."
"But I get paid for that," he said. "I charge those patients, you know."
"I know," J. S. Stanczyk said, "but when you save somebody's life they can't begin to pay you enough. That's the way we feel about your business, and we'd like to do this for you."
"I'm not accustomed to hearing people talk like this about doctors," he said.
"Ain't I right, though?"
"I don't know," he said, "but thanks again."
"Our pleasure," J. S. Stanczyk said.
He knew, driving away, that on the next first Tuesday there would be sandwiches again. There were sandwiches every first Tuesday, and so he began, every third visit or so, to bring a box of candy for Mrs. Stanczyk. He also began, on the last week of every month, to watch his gas gauge, trying to deplete the gas in the tank so that, when he got to J. S. Stanczyk's, it would take close to twenty gallons. Several times, leaving Veterans' Hospital, he was afraid he would run out of gas before he got there, and he wanted to end the whole relationship and forget the J. S. Stanczyks.
But after she's made those sandwiches I can't leave them there, he thought. This thing is ridiculous.
"Gee, Doctor," J. S. Stanczyk said to him one of those times, "you better watch your gas gauge, or maybe it's busted."
"Why?" he said. "Did it take much?"
"It must have been almost empty. It took a whole twenty gallons."
"I'd better watch it," he said, eating his second sandwich and enjoying his victory.
"You don't wanna run out, goin' to some hospital," J. S. Stanczyk said. "I notice you been runnin' pretty close every time lately."
"Have I?" he said.
After that he decided to compromise, and he would pull into the station needing fifteen or sixteen or maybe only ten or twelve gallons. One day, and he would remember it was in the spring, he drove up to the pumps but, when he got out of the car, he could see J. S. Stanczyk nowhere. Instea
d a woman came out of the station.
"May I help you?" she said.
"Is Mr. Stanczyk here?"
"No," she said. "I'm sorry, but he'll be back in about an hour."
"Are you Mrs. Stanczyk?"
"I am," she said, smiling.
She was of medium height and in her early fifties. She had small features and delicate nostrils and she was wearing a clean light blue cotton dress and had a pair of men's white work gloves in her hands.
"I'm Dr. Carter," he said.
"Oh," she said, shaking hands. "I'm pleased to meet you."
"I'm glad to meet you, and to thank you personally for feeding me all these months."
"I'm happy to do it, Doctor, and thank you for the candy. That isn't necessary."
"Neither are the sandwiches," he said. "Here. Let me help you."
"Oh, no," she said. "I'm good at this."
She had put on the gloves and, as he watched, feeling embarrassed, she started to pump the gas into the car.
"Your lunch is waiting for you in Jack's lunch box by the cash register," she said. "Why don't you go in?"
"Mr. Stanczyk isn't I'll, is he?" he said, when she came in.
"No," she said. "He had to go to the bank on some business. We can't afford any regular help, so I fill in for him once in a while."
She must have been quite pretty when he married her, he was thinking, and there is an air of refinement about her, even when she is pumping gas.
"You don't have any children?" he said.
"Oh, yes," she said. "We have a son nineteen, but he's in college."
"Your husband never mentioned him to me."
"Jack doesn't like to brag," she said, "but we're very proud of our boy. In fact, he's going to be a doctor."
"I'm glad to hear that," he said. "We need good doctors."
"I think hell be a good one."
"How are his marks?"
"He gets A's and B's."
"I'd like to meet him."
"I'd like you to meet him," she said. "You know, my husband will be embarrassed when I tell him I mentioned Frank to you, but you understand we're not asking any favors."
"I know that," he said.
He met Frank Stanczyk a month later. The boy was home from college for the summer, and the next week he was starting to work as a laborer on a road-construction project. He was an inch under six feet, with good shoulders and a slim waist and flat hips, and he had brown hair, cut short, and dark brown eyes. When he said something to you he looked right at you, as if he were studying the effect of his words.
They talked about his courses and about medical schools, and he did not see the boy again that summer. He saw him only two or three times during the next two years, but on the first Tuesday during the Christmas -New Year vacation of Frank Stanczyk's second year in medical school he found him tending the gas station for his father.
"How's school?" he said to him, sitting in the station and having the sandwiches and Coke.
"It's pretty rugged," Frank Stanczyk said.
"Why do you want to be a doctor?"
"It's hard to say," Frank Stanczyk said. "As long as I can remember, my folks have been talking about my becoming a doctor."
"That's no reason."
"I realize that," Frank Stanczyk said, "but I think it's also true that if I didn't feel strongly myself that I wanted to be a doctor I would have revolted against my parents' wishes. I did that on a number of minor issues during the process of growing up."
"So why do you want to be a doctor?"
"Well, it may sound comy, but I'd like to feel that in my work I'm providing a necessary service. I can't see myself contented just working at a job, like my dad does, or going into an office or selling some product nobody needs. You know what I mean?"
"I know what you mean," he said, "but your dad provides a service. I need gas and oil to keep this car running, and so does everybody else."
"Don't get me wrong," Frank Stanczyk said. "I respect my dad."
"I know you do."
"He's worked hard and deprived himself and my mother of things to give me an education, but keeping cars running isn't what I want to do. There are too many automobiles on the road, too much moving around in our society anyway. This isn't essential. My dad fills up some crazy kid's gas tank, and the kid cracks up and kills himself and maybe takes two or three other people with him, too. Who needs that?"
"Let me tell you something " he said. "A couple of months ago, in my examining room, I had one of this country's great naval heroes. In the waiting room, waiting to get into the examining room, was a man, described by the newspapers anyway, as this section's—and maybe one of this country's—biggest racketeers. According to the newspapers he runs off-track betting, numbers, and maybe narcotics."
"Is that right?"
"That's right, and it so happened that I was able to help both of them. Now these were two men, both severely I'll, and it wasn't up to me to judge between them. I can't take any more credit for what the admiral does with the rest of his life—that life I have preserved—than I can be blamed for what the hoodlum does with his."
"I see your point, Doctor," Frank Stanczyk said, looking at him and nodding. "That's very interesting."
"I'm no different than your dad. When somebody drives up here for gas it isn't up to him to decide what the driver is going to do with that car. That crazy kid has a legal right to drive—a license—and the hoodlum has a legal right to remain out of jaQ or he wouldn't be in my office as a free man."
"But that's an exception. Most of the people a doctor treats are decent people."
"And they drive cars."
"You're right," Frank Stanczyk said, smiling. "What I mean about being a doctor, though, is that you extend life. When you strip our society of its non-essentials and then get down to the lesser essentials, you come, finally, to the one basic essential—the need to go on living. The way I feel, if I just preserve for one person one more day of life I'd be doing more, really, than I could do in any other profession or business."
"I see."
"But don't get me wrong, Doctor. I'm not looking for a halo. This just happens to be the way I am, and what I want to do to satisfy myself. Anyway, I suppose that just preserving for one person one more day of life doesn't seem like much to you, but I'm just beginning and when I get older I'll probably lose sight of that."
"I hope you never do," he said.
He's a fine kid, he was thinking, driving away. If I had a son of my own I'd want him to be like this, but if I had a son like this I'd probably spoil him, and J. S. Stanczyk and that good wife of his haven't spoiled him one bit.
He saw, in Frank Stanczyk's senior year in medical school, that Frank Stanczyk had applied for an internship at Mercy. There were 106 applicants for the six openings in surgery, and as the attending thoracic surgeon he saw their applications and their records and he sat on the examining board with Ross Young, the chief of surgery, and the three others.
They interviewed them over a period of three weeks, sitting behind the big table in the main conference room with their name plaques in front of them, and the applicants coming in and sitting down in the chair facing them. They alternated, one examiner asking the questions of one applicant, and when he saw Frank Stanczyk walk in, the third applicant on the very first day, he felt it in his stomach and he was glad that it was not his turn to question him and that it was Ross Young's.
Ross Young said that they had all seen Frank Stanczyk's record, and that they wanted to know why he had chosen to apply to Mercy Hospital for an internship. Frank Stanczyk said that he hoped, during his training, to acquire as much varied experience as he could, and that Mercy Hospital had the most active ambulance service and was the most active hospital in the area.
Thank the Lord, Matthew Carter was thinking, listening, that he's not saying it's because of the excellence of the staff. I should have known that he wouldn't try to flatter his way in, as too many of them try to do.
&nbs
p; "But I suppose," Frank Stanczyk was saying, and showing no sign of nervousness, "that every applicant tells you that."
"Not exactly," Ross Young said, "but tell me this. What are your interests outside of medicine?"
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