The Sisterhood

by Michael Palmer

  “Oh?” Janet shifted in her chair.

  “Yes, and even one of those was a little strange.”

  “How do you mean?” The question was asked matter-of-factly, but Janet’s posture and expression suggested more than passing interest.

  Christine glanced at her watch impatiently. They had only five minutes before report. “Oh, it was nothing, really. Just that the flowers in the last vase were lilies, and the card attached to them said something like ‘Best Wishes from Lily,’ that’s all.”

  “Oh,” Janet said with a flatness not mirrored in her eyes. She scratched absently at the scar beside her nose, then suddenly changed the subject. “Are you thinking about submitting this Thomas’s wife to the Screening Committee?”

  “I’ve already done it.” Christine felt off balance.

  “And?”

  “And nothing, Janet. I haven’t heard yet whether she’s been approved. You see, Charlotte and I have grown very very close to one another—”

  “Well, I say, ‘Bravo for you,’ ” Janet broke in.

  “What?”

  “I hope she’s approved.”

  “Janet, you don’t even know the woman … or the situation. How can you possibly say …”

  “I may not know her, but I know Huttner. Of all the pompous, conceited, self-righteous bastards who ever hid behind a goddamn M.D., Huttner is the worst.”

  Janet’s outburst was totally unexpected. For a time Christine was speechless. Certainly it was the overzealous, at times ego-based aggressiveness of physicians that had spawned The Sisterhood, but to Christine it had always been a conflict of philosophies, not personalities. “Wh … what has Huttner’s conceit got to do with Charlotte?” She felt confused and strangely apprehensive.

  Janet calmed her with a wide smile. “Whoa, slow down,” she said, patting her on the knee. “I’m on your side. Remember?” Christine nodded, but uncertainty remained. “I believe in The Sisterhood and what we’re doing the same way you do. Why else would I have recruited you? All I was trying to say is that in cases like this Mrs. Thomas we get a … double benefit. We get to honor the wishes of the woman and her husband by reestablishing some dignity in her life, and at the same time we get to remind a person like Huttner that he’s not God. Yes?”

  Christine evaluated the notion, then relaxed and returned the smile. “Yes, I … guess we do.” She rose to leave.

  “If support is what you need,” Janet said, “you’ve got mine. I think you did the right thing in presenting this woman, and now it’s up to the Screening Committee to do its part.”

  Christine nodded her acknowledgment.

  Janet continued as she reached the door. “You know, Christine,” she said, pausing to study the younger woman’s face, “it’s quite all right to benefit from doing something you believe in. The goodness of any work isn’t diminished by the fact that you might, in some way, profit from it. Do you understand?”

  “I … I think so,” Christine lied. “Thanks for talking with me. I’ll let you know what the Committee decides.”

  “Do that, please. And Chris? I’m here if you need me.”

  Still uneasy, Christine hurried to the nurses’ lounge. She paused outside the door, trying to compose herself. Janet’s explosion on the subject of Wallace Huttner had been startling, but it wasn’t as disturbing as it had at first seemed. Janet had been part of The Sisterhood for years; surely she had handled a number of cases. Proposing and carrying out a death, even a euthanasia death, was an emotionally charged, gut-wrenching business. Over the years the necessity of facing the same decisions again and again was bound to take its toll in some way. In Janet’s case, Christine decided, it was a bitterness toward those who made such awesome choices necessary.

  She glanced down the hall in time to see Janet step into the elevator. The woman was an excellent supervisor and, even more important, a nurse dedicated to the truest ideals of the profession. In the moment before she entered the nurses’ lounge, Christine felt a resurgence of pride at the secrets she shared with her “sister.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Carl Perry steeled himself against the pain he knew would knife through his throat, then, as gingerly as possible, swallowed. Pain, almost any pain, was better than the goddamn drooling he had been doing since the polyps or growths or whatever they were had been snipped off his vocal cords. It would be two more days of bed rest, intravenous fluids, and writing notes in order to communicate before the danger of his vocal cords swelling shut would be passed. At least, that’s what Dr. Curtis had told him.

  He reached over and tugged at the band of adhesive tape that held the intravenous line in place on his right forearm. Several hairs popped free from his skin and he hissed a curse at the I.V. nurse who had neglected to shave the area clean.

  “I.V. tape—complain to Drs. Hosp. Admin.,” he scribbled on a pad, tearing the note off and stuffing it in a drawer that was rapidly filling with other, similar reminders.

  He flipped up the small mirror in his Formica hospital tray and took stock of himself. Even with the scratches Curtis’s instruments had made on the corners of his mouth, he liked what he saw. Deep blue eyes, tanned skin just leathery enough, square jaw, perfect teeth. He looked the way most other men of forty-eight could only dream of looking. The women saw it, too—even the young ones. They fought for the chance to spend a few hours with him in the suite he kept at the Ritz. They all went home satisfied, too.

  What a perfect idea it had been to start the rumor around the singles bars that each year the girl who gave him the best lay would get a free Porsche courtesy of Perry’s Foreign Motors. He might actually do it too, if the day ever came when his looks gave out on him.

  Bored and uncomfortable on the sweaty sheets, he flipped on the television, then just as quickly turned it off. Nothing but the eleven o’clock news starting on every channel. He massaged the front of his blue silk pajama pants and felt the stirrings of an erection. No, not yet, he decided. Wait until you’re really ready to go to sleep, then have at it.

  At that moment a nurse stepped into his room, closing the door carefully behind her. She was the same one who had sat on his bed and talked to him the night before the operation. A little old, maybe forty, he thought, but with a body that just wouldn’t quit. Perry felt an immediate surge in the limp organ beneath his hand and again began massaging himself under the sheets, picturing the shapely nurse lying nude on his hotel suite bed, waiting for him.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Perry?” she asked softly. She was standing less than a foot from him. Inviting him, he just knew it.

  For a moment Perry was torn by the dilemma of having to release himself in order to write a note. Finally, he scribbled. “Fine, sweetheart, how’re you?”

  “Is there anything I can get for you before I call it quits for the night?” she asked, moving an inch closer.

  Perry checked her left hand for a wedding ring. There was none, but that added little to his already mushroomed fantasy. “That depends …”he wrote.

  “On what?”

  Teasing him, tantalizing—that’s what she was doing. He decided to chance it. “Whether we make it now or after I get out!”

  He debated writing about the free Porsche, but rejected the notion as unnecessary.

  “Do we do it alone or invite your wife along with us?”

  His new, giddy abstraction had her legs stretched upward, heels resting on the wall over his bed. “Wife doesn’t understand me,” he wrote, playing along and adding a little smile face to the bottom of the page.

  “Well, we’ll see about everything when you’re a little better,” she said. “I’ll admit that the idea of spending some nice time with you had crossed my mind.” She toyed with the top button of her uniform and for a moment Perry thought she actually might undo it for him.

  “You say when,” he scribbled, slipping his free hand around her thigh.

  “Soon.” She smiled and stepped out of his grasp. “First, I have two presents for you. One
is from your doctor and one is from me. Which do you want first?”

  Perry deliberated, then wrote “Yours.”

  The woman left the room and returned holding something behind her back. Perry inhaled sharply at the way her uniform pulled tightly across her breasts. A C for sure, he thought. Absolutely. Thirty-four C. He looked up at her beaming face and noticed, for the first time, a thin scar running almost parallel to one side of her nose. A minor flaw, he decided. Candlelight, a little makeup, and, poof, no more scar.

  After giving him what seemed like a deliberately prolonged look at her, the nurse theatrically drew her hands from behind her back. She held a bouquet of flowers. Bright, purple flowers.

  “Beautiful,” he wrote.

  “They’re hyacinths,” she said.

  After a brief search for a vase, she set the flowers in the empty urinal that rested on his bedside table. Perry winced at her somewhat crude break with the romantic mood of the moment. Maybe she’s into kinky sex, he thought, not at all certain he was ready to play someone else’s game.

  “Second present?” he wrote.

  “Just some new medicine.” She moved inches from his face as she produced a syringe full of clear liquid from her pocket and injected it in the tubing of his intravenous line.

  He reached out and again grabbed her by the back of the thigh. This time she made no attempt to move away. Suddenly he felt a strange tightness in his chest. His grip weakened, then, in less than a minute, disappeared all together. With difficulty and mounting panic, he turned his head upward and looked at the nurse. She was standing motionless, smiling benevolently down at him. He tried to scream, but only a soft hiss emerged from beneath his swollen, paralyzed vocal cords.

  The air became as thick and heavy as molasses. No matter how hard he tried, he could not force it down into his lungs. His left arm dangled uselessly over the side of the bed.

  “It’s called pancuronium,” the nurse said pleasantly. “A rapid-acting form of curare. Just like on poison darts. You see, your wife understands you much better than you realized, Mr. Perry. She understands you so well that she is willing to share a large portion of your insurance with us in order to eliminate you from her life.”

  Perry tried to respond, but could no longer manage even a blink. A dull film seemed to cover all the objects in the room, as gradually his panic yielded to a detached sense of euphoria. Through now immovable eyes and the mounting film, he watched the nurse carefully unbutton the top two buttons of her uniform, exposing the deep cleft between her breasts.

  “Don’t worry about the flowers, Mr. Perry. I’ll see to it that they get some water,” were the last words that he heard.

  Janet Poulos set Perry’s arm on the bed, checked the darkened corridor of Three West, and calmly left the floor. As the stairway door closed behind her, she gave in to the smile that had been tugging at her mouth from the moment the last of the pancuronium was injected. It had been an incredibly profitable day for The Garden. Just as Dahlia had promised it would be. First, a masterful performance by Lily, and now she, Hyacinth, had done at least as well. She laughed, and listened to her echo reverberate throughout the empty stairwell.

  In her office on One North, Janet settled behind her desk, then closed her eyes and relived the scene in Carl Perry’s room. The sense of power—of ultimate control—was at least as thrilling as it had been at the bedside. It was an excitement that she, like all the others in The Garden, had first discovered through The Sisterhood of Life. The Sisterhood, with its high-flown nobility, was fine for some, Janet reflected, but Dahlia’s creation of the Garden had been sheer inspiration. That they could be paid, and paid well, for their efforts only sweetened the game. Janet blessed Dahlia for bringing Hyacinth to life.

  Then, as so often happened after she handled a Sisterhood or Garden case, Janet began thinking about the man—the first man who had ever taken her, the only man she had ever loved. Was he a professor of surgery now as he had planned? Why had he never called again after that night? Well, he would certainly see her in a different light now. She had power, too. As much as the most powerful surgeon in the world. If he could only see her he would … Janet shrugged. “Who cares,” she said out loud. “Who the hell cares anyhow.”

  She picked up the telephone. It was time to share the excitement of the day with Dahlia.

  CHAPTER VII

  It was after eleven thirty when the evening shift on Four South completed their report and the eleven-to-seven group took over for the night. Christine Beall rode the Pinkerton minibus to Parking Lot C. Exhausted, she declined an invitation for a nightcap from the four nurses riding with her and headed home.

  Twenty miles away, in the bedroom suburb of Wellesley, Dr. George Curtis downed two fingers of brandy and shuffled back to bed from his oak-paneled study. His wife, who had turned on the bedside lamp and propped herself up on several pillows, looked at him anxiously.

  “Well, how did it go with Mrs. Perry?” she asked.

  Curtis sank down on the edge of the bed and sighed his relief. “She’s pretty shaken up, but all things considered, she seems to be holding together all right. I offered to go over there and talk with her, but she said it wouldn’t be necessary, that she had people. Best of all, she didn’t say anything about wanting an autopsy.”

  His wife was concerned. “What do you mean ‘best of all’? George, is something the matter?”

  “Well, from what the resident on duty told me, Perry must either have had a coronary or bled into his vocal cords where I did the surgery. Either way, his wife could try and make a case for negligence by saying he should have been cared for in the I.C.U. Without an autopsy, she’s got no definite findings, so she’s got no grounds for a suit, and I say ‘Amen’ to that.”

  “Amen,” his wife echoed as she turned off the light and rolled over next to him.

  Christine drove slowly, steering by rote, unaware of the traffic around her. On the gaslit sidewalks the night world of the inner city was in full cry. The hookers and the hustlers, the junkies and the winos, and the clusters of young men milling outside tavern doorways. It was a world that usually fascinated her, but this night the people and the action went unnoticed. Her mind had begun playing out a far different scene.

  It was a tennis match. Two women on a grassy emerald court. Or perhaps it was only one, for she never saw them both at the same time. Just a bouncing figure in a white dress, swinging out with energetic, perfect strokes.

  Totally immersed in the vision, she cruised through a red light, then onto a wide boulevard leading out of the city.

  All at once, Christine realized why it seemed like a match. With each swing, each stroke, the woman’s face changed. First it was Charlotte Thomas, radiant, laughing excitedly at every hit; then it was the drawn, sallow face of her own mother, a stern Dutch woman whose devotion to her five children had eventually worn her to a premature death.

  The strokes came faster and faster, and with each of them a flashing change in the competitor’s face until it was little more than a blur.

  Suddenly Christine glanced at the speedometer. She was going nearly eighty. Seconds later, a route sign shot past. She was traveling in a direction nearly opposite to her house.

  Shaking almost uncontrollably, she screeched to a stop on the shoulder and sat, gasping as if she had just finished a marathon. Several minutes passed before she was able to turn around and resume the drive home.

  It was after midnight when she reached the quiet, treelined street where she and her roommates had lived for two years. The decision to search for an apartment in Brookline had been unanimous. “An old town with a young heart,” Carole D’Elia had called it, referring to the thousands of students and young working people who inhabited the quaint duplexes and apartment buildings. After a three-week search, they found—and immediately fell in love with—the first-floor apartment of a brown and white two family. Their landlady, a blue-haired widow named Ida Fine, lived upstairs. The day after they moved in, a large
pot of soup outside their door heralded Ida’s intention to adopt the three of them. Christine had resented her intrusion in their lives at first, but Ida was irrepressible—and usually wise enough to sense when she had overstayed her welcome.

  Christine, Carole, and Lisa Heller were quite different from one another, but tailor made for living together. Carole, an up-and-coming criminal lawyer, handled the bills, while Christine took care of the shopping and other day-to-day essentials of cooperative living. Lisa, a buyer for Filene’s, was the social chairman.

  With a groan of relief and fatigue, Christine eased her Mustang up the driveway and into its customary spot next to Lisa’s battered VW. The two-car garage was so full of the “treasures” Ida was constantly promising to throw out that there had never been room inside for more than their bicycles. As she walked around to the front, Christine noticed for the first time that lights were blaring from every room. A party. The last thing in the world she wanted to deal with. “Lisa strikes again,” she muttered, shaking her head.

  The unmistakable odor of marijuana hit her as soon as she opened the door. From the living room the music of an old Eagles album mixed with the clinking of glasses and a half-dozen simultaneous conversations. She was searching her thoughts for somewhere else to sneak off to for the night when Lisa Heller popped out from the living room.

  Three years younger than Christine, and six inches taller, Lisa was dressed in what had become the unofficial uniform of the house—well-worn jeans and a baggy man’s shirt pirated from some past lover. Her face had a perpetually intellectual, almost pious look to it that seemed invariably to attract men who were “into” Mahler and organic food, both of which Lisa abhorred.

  “Aha! The prodigal daughter returneth to the fold.” She giggled.

  There was something disarming about Lisa that had always made even Christine’s blackest moments seem more manageable. “Lisa,” she said, smiling around clenched teeth, “how many people are in there?”