MASH 09 MASH goes to Vienna
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M*A*S*H Goes to New Orleans (V2)
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M*A*S*H Goes to Vienna
Further misadventures of M*A*S*H
Richard Hooker
And
William E. Butterworth
Pocket Book edition published June, 1976
M*A*S*H GOES TO VIENNA
POCKET BOOK edition published June, 1976
This original POCKET BOOK edition is printed from brand-new
plates made from newly set, clear, easy-to-read type.
POCKET BOOK editions are published by
POCKET BOOKS,
a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.,
A GULF+WESTERN COMPANY
630 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10020.
Trademarks registered in the United States
and other countries.
Standard Book Number: 671-80458-8.
Copyright, ©, 1976, by Richard Hornberger and William E. Butterworth. All rights reserved. Published by POCKET BOOKS, New York, and on the same day in Canada by Simon & Schuster of Canada, Ltd., Markham, Ontario.
Printed in the U.S.A.
In fond memory of Malcolm Reiss,
gentleman literary agent
June 3, 1905-December 17, 1975
—Richard Hooker and W. E. Butterworth
MASH GOES TO Vienna is an original POCKET BOOK edition.
Books in the MASH Series
MASH
MASH Goes to Maine
MASH Goes to New Orleans, January, 1975
MASH Goes to Paris, January, 1975
MASH Goes to London, June, 1975
MASH Goes to Las Vegas, January, 1976
MASH Goes to Morocco, January, 1976
MASH Goes to Hollywood, April 1976
MASH Goes to Vienna, June, 1976
MASH Goes to Miami, September, 1976
MASH Goes to San Francisco, November, 1976
MASH Goes to Texas, February 1977
MASH Goes to Montreal, June, 1977
MASH Goes to Moscow, September, 1977
MASH Mania, February, 1979
Chapter One
It was afternoon conference time in the office of the chief of surgery of the Spruce Harbor, Maine, Medical Center. The chief surgeon, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, M.D., F.A.C.S., was sitting, attired in somewhat mussed and sweat-soaked surgical greens, behind his desk. His bare and rather bony feet rested atop the tooled- Moroccan-leather desk pad on the desk; he sat slumped far enough down in his dark-red leather judge’s chair so that a martini glass could rest (and indeed was resting) on his chest.
Two other practitioners of the cutting art were seated to Dr. Pierce's right on a two-seater leather couch. They too were attired in surgical greens, and they too had their feet off the ground and resting on a coffee table. The taller of the two, furthermore, also rested a martini glass on his chest. The shorter of the two had been denied, by the immutable idiosyncrasies of anatomy, the ability to rest a martini glass upon the upper portion of the body. She was Esther Flanagan, R.N., chief surgical nurse. It was necessary for her to hold her martini glass in a firm grip, its base resting on her tummy.
The taller of the two healers on the couch was John Francis Xavier McIntyre, M.D., F.A.C.S., and, like the others, he looked just a little worn and frazzled. It had been a busy day in the operating room, and while everything had eventually turned out well, everyone was quite aware that it very easily could have gone the other way and, in fact, with two patients almost had.
A fourth healer, sort of a journeyman cutter, Richard J. Wilson, M.D., officially described on the hospital roster as a surgical resident, was in the room. He was well aware of the social protocol involved. Participating in the postsurgical conference and critique was for him a privilege carrying with it both restrictions and obligations. He understood that it would have been very bad form for him to have the effrontery to slump in a chair and put his unshod feet on a table. While he was quite welcome to partake of a libation or two, he understood further that not only was he expected to make the martinis for the others but to do so with painstaking care, lavishing at least as much attention on the precise gin-vermouth ratio, the temperature of the finished product, and the condition of the onions (three for Nurse Flanagan, two for Drs. McIntyre and Pierce) as he had ever lavished on any combination of chemicals and biologicals in a pharmacological laboratory.
And finally, he understood that his role was to be unseen and unheard. His role in the pecking order clearly denied him the privilege of loudly cheering on, with whistles and applause, as the others were, the painted savages with bones in their noses who were threatening Tarzan with their spears on “The Movie Matinee,” which television extravaganza was being exhibited on the chief surgeon’s bookcase-mounted apparatus.
Having ensured that Nurse Flanagan and Drs. Pierce and McIntyre were each equipped with a fresh, properly chilled martini, Dr. Wilson sat respectfully in a straight-backed chair and waited for the commercials. Unless it was a good commercial (a good commercial being one which afforded any of the trio the opportunity to reply to the unctuous ladies and gentlemen of the tube), there was frequently a medical comment or two to be offered. These comments were never directed to Dr. Wilson directly, but rather between the doctors and the lady. He was permitted, in other words, to eavesdrop on what he considered, not without reason, to be a top-notch critique of surgical procedures, and for this privilege he was perfectly willing to act as bartender and passer-of-the-peanuts. He had learned more about surgery from these three people in the last three months than he had learned in a year’s formal training at a large and tactfully herein unnamed university medical center.
He had also learned, as sort of a bonus, the opinions these three held of the other members of the medical staff of the Spruce Harbor Medical Center. This had been something of an education in itself, there being apparently little correlation between income and prestige and professional ability.
And when the telephone rang, Dr. Wilson knew his duty here, too. He leapt from his chair and grabbed the telephone before the first ring had died.
“Dr. Pierce,” he whispered, so as not to interfere with his superior’s rapt fascination with Tarzan’s plight, “is in conference and not taking any calls.”
There was, in fact, a little button on Dr. Pierce’s telephone which, when depressed, activated a signal light on the telephone switchboard, indicating that a conference was in progress and the telephone should not ring.
Dr. Wilson looked at the television screen. It was commercial time. A wan-looking woman was staring soulfully at the camera.
“As a woman,” she said plaintively, “I know I need more iron than a man. But how can I get it?”
“A nail a day,” Dr. John Francis Xavier McIntyre replied solemnly, “keeps the doctor away.”
“Take two chocolate-flavored carpet tacks before every meal,” Nurse Flanagan said, “and again at bedtime.”
Dr. Pierce looked at Dr. Wilson.
“What did I do?” he asked. “Forget to push that damned button again?”
“It’s Mr. Crumley, Doctor,” Dr. Wilson replied.
T. Alfred Crumley, Sr., was not one of Dr. Pierce’s favorite people in all the world, possibly because he was administrator of the Spruce Harbor Medical Center, and there were naturally some areas of potential strife and disagreement between the chief surgeon and the man in ultimate charge of the bedpans, parking lot and air-conditioning system.
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On the other hand, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, M.D., was not one of T. Alfred Crumley, Sr.’s, favorite people either. Although his own medical career had faltered in the sophomore year of high school when Mr. Crumley, (then known to his peers as “Elephant Ears” Crumley) had lost consciousness and crashed to the floor during a frog dissection in Biology II, he still had very firm and positive ideas of the role and function of a physician and surgeon in society.
Both Dr. Pierce and Dr. McIntyre fell far short of Mr. Crumley’s expectations. Not, it should be made instantly clear, insofar as their professional qualifications or skill was concerned. Even Elephant Ears had been known to admit that he considered the two of them (as indeed did their peers) to be about the best chest-cutters north of Boston and east of Chicago.
It was in their out-of-the-operating-room behavior that Mr. Crumley felt improvement would be a good, even necessary thing. He did not think it lent dignity to the medical profession, for example, for a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons to arrive at his place of work attired in blue jeans, a T-shirt on which eat more possum had been imprinted in luminescent yellow paint, and at the wheel of a swamp buggy, as was Dr. McIntyre’s custom.
Nor did he think it was at all conducive to the image of respectability of the medical profession generally and the professional staff of the Spruce Harbor Medical Center specifically for Dr. Pierce to go directly (and often in his surgical greens) from the operating room to the bar of the Bide-a-While Pool Hall/Ladies Served Fresh Lobster & Clams Daily Restaurant & Saloon, Inc., there to spend the balance of the afternoon in somewhat bawdy song with the proprietor, one Stanley K. Warczinski, Sr.
Mr. Crumley, furthermore, deeply suspected (although he could not prove) that in the near sacrosanct precincts of his office, Dr. Pierce actually provided spirituous liquors to certain privileged associates, while a locked door and a sign reading conference in session gave the impression that he was about the hospital’s business.
“Please tell Mr. Crumley,” Dr. Pierce said, sipping at his martini, “that Dr. McIntyre and myself are in conference and do not wish to be disturbed.”
Dr. Wilson dutifully repeated this message to Mr. Crumley.
“I am quite sure I hear applause,” Mr. Crumley said, somewhat sharply. “Can you explain that?”
“Tarzan just fell out of a tree,” Dr. Wilson, who could not tell a lie, replied.
Dr. Pierce, having heard this, steadied his martini with his left hand and reached out for the telephone on his desk with his right.
“How they hanging, Crumley?” he asked.
“I trust I am not unnecessarily interrupting anything important?” Mr. Crumley asked.
“Get to the point, Crumley,” Dr. Pierce said. “I’m a busy man.”
“You’ll never guess who’s here in our hospital,” T. Alfred Crumley said.
“I’m a little old for guessing games, Crumley,” Dr. Pierce said.
“Taylor P. Jambon!” T. Alfred Crumley announced, excitement in every quivering syllable. “Himself!”
“You don’t really mean that Taylor P. Jambon, the famous gourmet and animal lover himself, is really here in Spruce Harbor Medical Center!” Dr. Pierce replied. Without bothering to cover the mouthpiece, he addressed Dr. McIntyre: “Trapper John, guess who’s here in the hospital?”
“Taylor P. Jambon, the famous gourmet and animal lover himself,” Dr. McIntyre, who was also known as Trapper John,* replied.
(*Dr. McIntyre, in his youth, had once been found in the Gentlemen's Rest Facility of a Boston & Bangor Railway car, somewhat en déshabille and in the company of a University of Maine cheerleader. Although the young woman had in fact gone quite willingly with Dr. McIntyre, she had decided, in the interests of maintaining her good name, that it would be best if she told the conductor and the railway detective that she had been trapped. Hence, Trapper John.)
“Thank you for the information, Mr. Crumley,” Dr. Pierce replied, “but Dr. McIntyre, who keeps on top of things like this, already knew.”
“Mr. Jambon,” Mr. Crumley went on, “came all the way here from Hollywood, California, to see Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington.”
“You don’t mean it!” Dr. Pierce said, and then again addressed Dr. Mclntrye. “Mr. Jambon came all the way to see Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington.”
“You don’t mean it!” Trapper John said.
“I have it straight from Mr. Crumley himself,” Dr. Pierce replied. “So it must be true.”
“Will wonders never cease?” Trapper John said.
“And there seems to be some little mix-up,” Mr. Crumley went on.
“Is that so?” Dr. Pierce replied.
“There is a ‘Positively No Admission, Positively No Visitors’ sign on Miss Worthington’s door,” Mr. Crumley said.
“You don’t say?”
“It bears your signature,” Mr. Crumley said.
“So it does,” Dr. Pierce admitted.
“Far be it from me, as hospital administrator, to even suggest to question a medical decision of one of the professional staff, much less our distinguished chief of surgery,” Mr. Crumley went on, “but according to the records, Miss Worthington is suffering from a fractured right femur and a fractured left humerus.”*
(* Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington, star of stage, screen and lately television, had come to Maine for the on-location filming of the first episode of the Wesley St. James television daytime drama series “The Code of the Deep Woods,” In which she was to play the role of kindly Grandmother Nobleheart. There were some problems, including Miss Worthington’s condition when she arrived at Spruce Harbor International Airport full of good cheer, specifically Old White Stagg Blended Kentucky Bourbon, and exited the aircraft without benefit of stairs.
The series had to be canceled, of course, and the production crew left, leaving Miss Worthington in the Spruce Harbor Medical Center. The details of this affair have been recorded in somewhat revolting detail in the otherwise highly literate and culturally enriching tome M*A*S*H Goes to Hollywood (Pocket Books, New York, 1976), which is offered for sale in bus and airline terminals, drugstores, five-and-ten-cent stores and other gathering places for literary cognoscenti.)
“Known in the trade as a busted leg and a busted arm,” Dr. Pierce replied. “Your information is correct, Mr. Crumley. That sometimes happens when you take one giant step from an airliner door to the ground.”
“So far as I know,” Mr. Crumley went on, “broken limbs are not contagious, and Miss Worthington’s latest charts indicate she is recuperating as well as can be expected, under the circumstances.”
“Right you are,” Dr. Pierce replied.
“May I then inquire why it is your medical judgment that the patient’s best interests will be served by medical isolation?” Crumley asked.
“It has nothing to do with the patient’s best interests,” Dr. Pierce said.
“I don’t follow you, Doctor.”
“I told Miss Worthington that the next time she drove one of our teenaged hospital helpers, one of our candy-stripers, to tears by referring to the food she was served as a bleeping pile of blap served by a bleeping blap, I would throw her in the slammer. She did, and I did.”
“There must be some misunderstanding!” Mr. Crumley protested.
“No, none at all,” Dr. Pierce replied. “I heard her myself. I haven’t heard such language since I was a military surgeon in Korea and the walls of the nurses’ shower somehow came tumbling down while Major Hot Lips Houlihan was performing her ablutions.”
“It made me blush,” Trapper John said.
“Dr. McIntyre said it made him blush,” Dr. Pierce went on. “So there you are!”
“But Mr. Taylor P. Jambon has come all the way from Hollywood, California, to see Miss Worthington,” Mr. Crumley said.
“Hawkeye,” Trapper John said, “I have just had a thought.”
“Hold everything, Crumbum,” Dr. Pierce said. “Dr. McIntyre is thin
king.”
“That’s Crumley, Dr. Pierce,” Mr Crumley said, somewhat icily.
“Hawkeye, I would say,” Trapper John said, “that Miss Worthington and Mr. Taylor P. Jambon deserve each other. How ’bout that, Flanagan?”
“He’s got something, Hawkeye,” Esther Flanagan said, rising with some effort from the couch to steady her martini glass as Dr. Wilson refilled it.
“O.K., Crumley,” Hawkeye said, “you have my permission to let him in for thirty minutes.”
“Thank you very much,” Mr. Crumley said, and the phone went dead.
Dr. Hawkeye Pierce laid the telephone back in its cradle and returned his attention to the television.
“Oh, damn,” he said, with genuine regret. “I should have known that the good guys could never win. Here comes that damned elephant again to save Tarzan.”
“Disgusting, that’s what it is,” Nurse Flanagan said. She raised her head to look at Dr. Wilson. “Turn it off, Junior,” she ordered.
“I read somewhere,” Trapper John said, “that too much martini drinking in the afternoon is bad for you. What do you say we all go down to the Bide-a-While for a beer?”
“Good thinking, Trapper John,” Hawkeye Pierce said. “This hospital is not big enough for Taylor P. Jambon and me at the same time.”
Dr. Wilson quickly began to clear away the glasses, peanuts, and booze bottles. Dr. McIntyre called the Recovery Room, got favorable reports from the nurse on duty concerning their patients, and then called the switchboard.
“This is Dr. McIntyre,” he said. “Dr. Pierce, Dr. Wilson, Nurse Flanagan and I will be in the laboratory. Will you please adjust the Professional Personnel Locator Board accordingly?”
That accomplished, Dr. McIntyre stepped to the curtains covering the windows of the office. He drew them back. Dr. Pierce opened the window and then bowed Nurse Flanagan through. The nurse waited on the lawn beside the long-needled pine and other evergreens until the doctors had joined her. Then, arm in arm, they marched across the lawn to the swamp buggy, climbed aboard, and with a roar of the diesel engine and a cloud of blue smoke, departed the grounds of the Spruce Harbor Medical Center for the Bide-a-While Pool Hall. *