"You like them, yes?" she said the next day. "Sometime, then, you come to our house and I cook you a meal. Yes?"
"Yes," he said, knowing that it would never be. "I'd like that."
Before and after visiting hours, when he had the time, he would stop by and sit and talk with Mr. Kroner. At first he did this because he felt sorry for Mr. Kroner and wanted to ease Mr. Kroner's loneliness, but by the second week he knew that he did it, too, to ease his own loneliness because he was many miles from home. In this way he came to know all about Mr. Kroner and about his life and his dreams and about what hopes he still had.
Mr. Kroner, he learned, had been bom in a small town in Germany, the only son of a cabinet maker, and from his father he had learned his trade. He had married Mrs. Kroner in that town, and in 1899 they had come to this country because in this country, surely, there would be more need for a good cabinet maker.
"But in this country," Mr. Kroner said, "no one cares for good cabinets. Everything is factory, factory. In this country I find all of the furniture is made in Grand Rapids, and this is not cabinets. This is boxes with a shiny front. This I cannot make myself to make, so I become a carpenter instead and there I can at least do good carpentry, and cabinets I make for my own house and for my friends."
As he talked with Mr. Kroner he found he was telling him about his own beginnings and his own career. This was a simple man to whom he could talk about his own simple dreams as he could to no one else in these harried, hectic halls of professionalism where everyone seemed to be carrying so many burdens of his own that there was no room for those of another.
"You will be a good doctor," Mr. Kroner said to him, "because you care for people. You will be a better doctor than Dr. Williams because I do not think he cares for people."
"Oh, yes he does," he said. "Dr. Williams is a great surgeon, but he's very busy."
"I know," Mr. Kroner said, "but you will be better, and I tell you what I do. If I get out from this place I make you a cabinet. I make a cabinet for when you have your own office, and I make it from mahogany with the inlay on the front around the edges of the doors and around the top edge. No doctor will have a more beautiful cabinet than I make for you. I be proud to do it, and of this cabinet you can be proud, too."
"Yes," he said, again knowing. "I'll be very proud of it."
"Then first you must get me out from this place. Right?"
"Right," he said.
Thus it was that, as he watched Mr. Kroner die, he carried this burden of his own creation. Three weeks ago neither he nor Mr. Kroner had even heard of the other, but thus it was that it was he who was alone with Mr. Kroner, holding Mr. Kroner's pulse when, at 2:30 in the morning two days before Christmas, that pulse stopped beating.
"Well," Dr. Williams said when he called him and told him at 8 o'clock, "the family was prepared for it."
"That's right, sir," he said.
"You've gotten along very well with that family, haven't you?" Williams said.
'Yes, sir."
"Then it will probably be better if the wife hears it from you," Williams said. "Ask her for a post-mortem, too. It's always better to get those permissions before the family has too much time to talk it all over, and I'd like an autopsy."
"Yes, sir."
"And while I've got you on the phone," Williams said, "how's that thoracoplasty I did yesterday, that Mrs. Woodman?"
"She's not one of mine, Doctor," he said. "I think Bill O'Donnell has her."
"That's right," Williams said. "Thanks anyway, Carter."
"You're welcome, sir," he said.
So it was that he knew that none of it in medical school, none of that with the cadaver and Physical Diagnosis and Surgical Anatomy and the rest of it then and since, had changed him. So it was that he wondered if he were really fit to be a doctor, and he asked himself how he could possibly continue to lose some of himself like this, time and time again, year after year, and he remembered something Pete Church had said after he had just lost a case and they were walking together out of the room.
"Have you ever wished you were a horticulturist?" Pete Church had asked him, suddenly.
"A horticulturist? No, sir."
"I have," Pete Church had said, "because when a flower dies, nobody cries."
About a month later a letter came from his father. His father had written it late at night, after his mother had gone to bed.
"Something strange is happening to your mother," his father wrote. "No matter how warm the house is she's complaining all the time about being cold. She also has trouble thinking of words, and yesterday she slapped a woman. You don't know the woman, Mrs. Kelly, but your mother has been friendly with her for years and you know your mother was never like that. She has me worried."
When he read the letter he knew, or felt he knew, what it was. He had just finished some studies on the brain, and he inquired about brain specialists in the Southwest and that night he called his father and gave him the name of the man. Five nights later his father called.
"He wants to operate," his father said.
"How's Mother?" he said.
"She's having trouble even speaking."
"Then he's got to operate," he said.
"I don't know," his father said. 'Tour brother is against it and I'm not sure."
"Of course he's got to operate," he said. "Who are you and Mark to doubt the decision of a man who has devoted his whole life to this work? Your wife and our mother is entitled to the knowledge of our time."
So he convinced his father and three days later they operated and found a malignant brain tumor. On the fourth post-operative day, without ever speaking again, his mother died, and when they called him that afternoon and told him he asked for a post-mortem, because he knew he would ask this of many others, and then he went to his room and locked the door and he sat for a half-hour and thought of his mother as he remembered her.
He remembered her singing around the house and how she was always spouting those philosophies and how he and Mark used to grab her and dance her around the floor until she was red in the face and out of breath from dancing and from laughing. He remembered how, once, when Mark had started to smoke a pipe and she had complained that the house always smelled of it, they had wrestled her to the floor and he had held her nose and Mark had put the pipe in her mouth and made her puff on it.
"Can't you treat me with some dignity?" she had said when they had let her up and they were unsure whether she was going to cry or laugh. "Can't you remember that I'm your mother?"
After dinner in the summer either he or Mark would do the dishes with their father, and the other would walk with her out to the knoll behind the barns. She wanted to see the sun set, and they would watch it go down at the end of the valley and she would always say the same thing.
"Tomorrow will be beautiful," she would say. "It's going to be a beautiful tomorrow."
Now he knew that for her there would be no more tomorrows and he knew again that nothing had changed him or would ever change him. He wondered again if he were really meant to be a doctor and then he got up and unlocked the door and walked out.
Forty-five minutes later, because they were short-handed in Emergency, he was riding the ambulance through the dusk to Main Station. The driver swung the ambulance right up beside the train and when they got out they saw two conductors or trainmen down near the end of the platform, a small crowd around them, waving to them to come down to the second car from the end. In his white uniform and carrying his black bag he ran down the dimly lighted platform, the driver and the attendant running after him with the stretcher, and he climbed up and into the car.
"A heart attack, I think, Doc," one of the trainmen was saying. "I think it's a heart attack."
Halfway down the aisle two sailors were bending over a man lying face down on the floor. One of the sailors was administering artificial respiration and the two sailors and the man were blocking the aisle so that the women in the seats on either side were unable to
get out. The women were sitting, he remembered when he reconstructed it later, with their feet up under them, trying to withdraw as if there were a mouse or a rat in the car.
"Turn him over," he said to the sailors.
"It was like somebody shot him," one of the sailors said, while the other, who had been kneeling over the man got up and then the two of them, lifting the man, turned him over. "He was just walking down the aisle when he dropped like he was shot."
"Do something for him, Doctor!" one of the women was saying. "Do something!"
He looked at the big man lying on his back now on the floor and filling the aisle, his tie pulled down and his collar opened. He saw that the big man's jowled face was purple and his eyes were glassy and he opened the big man's shirt and pulled up his undershirt. With one hand he was trying to feel the pulse, but could feel none, and with the other he was putting on his stethoscope and then he was trying to hear the heart.
"Do something, Doctor!" the woman was saying. "Can't you do something?"
"Will you please keep still?" he said. "I can't hear a thing in this noise."
He could hear no beat. Listening, listening, he realized that his own heart was pounding from running down the platform and from his excitement and now what he was hearing was his own blood pressure pounding in his ears. He took off his stethoscope then and reached into his bag and found an ampoule of adrenalin and a long needle and then he inserted the needle into the chest and injected the adrenalin right into the heart.
"Come on!" he said, calling to the driver and the attendant standing down the aisle. "Let's get this man out of here."
"Is he alive, Doc?" one of the sailors said.
"I'm not sure," he said. "Thanks a lot for your help."
"Oh, my God!" one of the women said.
"That's all right, Doc," the sailor said. "He just dropped like he was shot."
It was a tight squeeze in the aisle but the attendant and the driver got the big man onto the stretcher and started him down the aisle. They had to jockey the stretcher at the end of the car to make the turn and get it down the steps onto the station platform.
"A heart attack, Doc?" one of the trainmen said.
"It looks that way," he said.
"He alive?"
"I doubt it, but I'm not sure yet."
"That's the second one I had this year," the trainman said.
In the parked ambulance he took out his stethoscope again and he put it once more to the big man's chest. All he could hear was the steam hissing from between the cars of the train still standing on the track so he closed the ambulance door. When he still could hear no beat he took the stethoscope off and the attendant, without saying anything, put the black oxygen mask over the big man's mouth and nose.
"This guy's dead, Doc," the attendant said after a while.
"Just let me check something," he said.
He took the small minor from his bag and held it close to the big man's mouth. When he looked at it there was no steam on it, and he found his ophthalmoscope in his bag and, shining the light first in one eye and then the other, squinting through the tiny lens, he tried to find an artery beating behind the pupils, but he found none.
"Well, where you wanna go, Doc?" the driver said. He had climbed behind the wheel and had shut the door on his side.
"Where do I want to go?" he said.
"Yeah," the driver said. 'You wanna take this guy to the hospital or the morgue?"
"There's no sense in taking him to the hospital, is there?" he said, still stalling. "He's dead, isn't he?"
"Whatever you say, Doc," the driver said. "Well drop you off at the hospital on the way."
The house staff at General had two traditions. If you delivered a baby in the ambulance you bought a case of beer for the weekly house-staff party, and if you brought a Dead On Arrival back to the hospital instead of to the morgue, you also had to buy one, and you knew that, long after the beer was gone, they would never let you forget it.
When they dropped him at the hospital and he sat down in Emergency to fill out his report, he began to sweat out the waiting. He was just finishing the report when one of the nurses called him and said the morgue was on the phone.
Oh, no, he said to himself, he's not alive. He can't be alive. How can he be alive? He's got to be dead.
"Yes?" he said, on the phone.
"Dr. Carter?" the man's voice said.
"Yes?"
"On this D.O.A," the voice said, "you forgot to fill in the hour of death."
"Oh," he said, relieved now. "I'm sorry. Put down 5:45 p.m., and thanks a lot."
But what kind of a doctor can I be, he was thinking when he had hung up, when I'm hoping a man is dead just so I won't be wrong? Can it be that I wanted him dead just to preserve what reputation I might have around this place?
In the space of two hours on one afternoon, through the deaths of his own mother and of a complete stranger, he had learned that his own attitude toward death was, and would be, controlled not only by the degree of his emotional involvement but by the extent of his professional involvement and his pride as well.
10:37 A.M.
XVI
I should have asked Rob what this Mrs. Scheller looks like, he was thinking, waiting for the elevator. It was only last week that she came in with her husband, a nice little woman, but I'm not so good on the faces any more. All I remember about her is that she was about six inches shorter than her husband and had dark brown hair and was wearing a dark blue dress. She said they'll be married thirty years next month and she was just about as nervous as her husband but she didn't have the disease and he did, so it was one of those times when I got more of the truth out of her than I did out of him. He wanted to belittle the pain in the shoulder and the coughing but she wouldn't let him and I should have asked Rob to describe her again in case there are two or three other women there when I walk into that lounge.
"Where to, Doctor?" the elevator operator said.
"Oh," he said. "Just up to the sixth."
"You're really circulatin' this morning, Doctor."
"That's right," he said. "That's the way I keep in shape."
"I could use a little exercise myself," the elevator operator said.
When he walked into the lounge Mrs. Scheller and a rather tall young man about thirty years old were sitting on the sofa. They were the only ones in the room, and Mrs. Scheller had on the same dark blue dress, or one like it, and the young man was saying something to her and she was nodding.
"Good morning," he said, walking over to them.
"Oh," Mrs. Scheller said, looking up. She stood up and her black handbag slid off her lap onto the floor. As she started to bend over, the young man bent down and picked it up and handed it to her.
"I'm so nervous today, Doctor," she said, shaking hands, "I don't know what I'm doing."
"I understand," he said, "but there's really no reason to be."
"I want you to meet my son," Mrs. Scheller said. "This is my son Harold."
"Hello, Doctor," the young man said, shaking hands.
"I'm glad to meet you," he said.
It had been late that afternoon the week before. He had just finished with his last patient for the day and he was sitting at his desk, starting to look at his mail.
"You busy, Matt?" Bob Robinson said.
"No," he said. "What's up?"
"Take a look at these," Rob said.
Rob walked over to the light panels on the wall behind the desk and snapped the two X-rays up under the clips. Then he lighted the two panels and stepped back and they looked at them together.
"What do you think?" Rob said.
"I think they're pretty poor pictures," he said, annoyed by the lack of definition but still able to make out the shadow, light and rather irregular and the size of a small lemon, just above the root of the right lung.
"I know," Rob said, "but for some reason it was the best they could do."
"What's the history?" he said, still looking at
the films and at that shadow.
"He's fifty-four years old," Rob said, looking at the sheets of paper in his hands, "and a house painter. About six months ago he was coughing and he spit up some blood. When the bleeding stopped he figured it was a cigarette cough and he forgot it. About two months ago he started to spit blood again. A chest film showed nothing abnormal, but about a week later—and his wife tells me this although he doesn't want to admit it—he felt some pain and there was more blood in his sputum. This has continued, although the pain has gone."
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