Jesse stared at him raggedly. They were ascending in the elevator and everything was eerie and weightless. A father. A father. “Did you say a father? A father?” Jesse asked. A strange word. Strange sound. He could not remember having spoken it out loud before. Father. Father Father.
“… a father?” Jesse whispered.
9
One spring day in 1955, Jesse was taking his daughter Jeanne to a pediatrician on Adams Street when he saw someone he recognized. He thought he recognized her: a woman waiting to cross the street, her face in profile. He had seen her somewhere before. His heart tripped suddenly; there was an intimacy between him and that woman, something that had happened under stress, nagging and unforgettable … yet he could not quite remember.
He paused to stare at her. She wore a fawn-colored spring coat, tailored and simple, and the flesh of her legs seemed to ripple in the cool spring air of Chicago, muscular and smooth. Or did he imagine this? Her flesh seemed to shiver as if she were aware of him. She wore no gloves. No rings. She wore no hat either—her long, thick blond hair was ruffled by the wind, and as Jesse watched she reached up to press it down against the side of her throat in a gesture that seemed somehow familiar to Jesse.
Had she been a patient of his?
His daughter tugged at his hand. “Daddy …?”
Jesse was still watching the woman. He saw that his attention had begun to draw her attention, that she glanced nervously toward him. Yet their eyes did not meet. She glanced away, troubled. And yet her face seemed to be turned toward his, lifting itself toward his gaze like a flower drawn by the sun, the petals ripening.
A striking woman. A surprise: as if Jesse had known her when she hadn’t been so beautiful.
Jeanne was nudging his legs.
“Just a minute, honey,” Jesse said.
She pressed against him and pulled at his hand. Ready to cry. All morning she had been crying off and on because she hated Dr. Leventhal. “It’s all right, Jeanne,” Jesse said gently, vaguely, while he tried to figure out where he had met that woman and whether she might remember him. He wondered if she might be the wife of a doctor. But no, he didn’t think so. He didn’t think she was anyone’s wife.
It angered him that he could not remember her.
At the hospital he had the reputation of a man who remembered everything. He could remember patients’ histories, medical records, charts, though he had seen them only once; he could keep miscellaneous items in his head for weeks. If a patient was readmitted after having been out of the hospital for several months, Jesse could recall at once the oddities of the case, the patient’s name and family.… He was unable to explain this talent of his, which was nothing he had especially desired or had trained himself in, but he was certain of it; it was permanent. And yet this woman was a puzzle to him.
Now she glanced at him, as if accidentally. She saw Jeanne. A kind of smile appeared on her face—tentative and cautious—and as the light changed from red to green she made a movement to step off the curb.
“Wait,” said Jesse suddenly, “wait—”
The woman stared at him. She hesitated. Jesse said hello, forcing himself to smile at her, to comfort her—what a beautiful face this young woman had! “Hello, I think we’ve met,” he said. He was so accustomed to ugly people that this girl’s beauty was a pleasure to him. He did not want to lose her so quickly.
She said nothing. She looked frankly and curiously at him.
“I’m Jesse Vogel. Don’t you remember me?”
He put out his hand. The gesture was so direct that she almost returned it; she almost shook his hand. She stood very still, looking down at Jeanne, up at Jesse again, trying to figure out who this man and his daughter were, her expression still cautious. She had a very fair face, framed by heavy blond hair that was brushed back from her forehead and fell loosely onto her shoulders. It was a thick, exaggerated style. It had the effect of weighing her down. Her face was oval, the bones of her cheeks prominent and somewhat emphasized by the clear, whitish air. Her nose was long, pale, almost white at its tip. There was an impersonal, almost unhuman waxiness to her nose and chin. But her cheekbones were high and fair and of a good color, and her lips were darkened in the bright red style of the day, outlined and filled in with a shade the color of berries. She was a tall woman in her late twenties.
She laughed to disguise her confusion. “Should I know you?” she said.
An airy, girlish voice. Jesse did not recognize it.
“Yes, I’m Jesse Vogel. Dr. Vogel,” he said, “and this is my little girl, Jeanne. But you’ve never met Jeannie.… You and I have met, don’t you remember me?”
“Dr. Vogel …?”
She brushed hair out of her eyes. Sighing as if exasperated with herself, or with Jesse, she bent to shake hands with Jeannie, “Hello, Jeannie Vogel,” she said in the same, airy, insincere voice. “How are you on this windy morning?”
Jeannie pressed against her father’s legs, shy.
“I’m afraid I don’t remember your name,” Jesse said.
“It’s Reva.”
“Reva …?”
She straightened, laughing. Her gaze moved away from Jesse and onto something behind him, as if she thought all this very crazy, very arrogant. It was clear that she was a woman not afraid of men, that she admired Jesse for his nerve. Jesse smiled deeply, grateful for her laughter and her good clean, even white teeth. Year of asking questions had given him the confident air of an authority who expects to be answered and who must be answered.
“Reva Denk. But I thought you knew me,” she said.
“Everything but your name.…” Jesse said.
Now they shook hands.
The girl drew her hand back nervously. People passed around them, strangers, nudging them closer together. Jesse felt as if he were close to an important revelation. But—but he could not quite understand what it might be—And now the girl was about to escape him, because there was no reason for her to hesitate any longer; the giddy momentum of their meeting had about run its course, and not even Jeanne’s presence could keep her talking to him any longer.…
“Well—good-by, Doctor,” she said.
She narrowed her eyes mockingly to let him know that he had taken advantage of her. Again Jesse’s heart tripped. But—but—
“It’s so strange that we’ve forgotten each other,” Jesse said seriously.
He did not smile.
The young woman backed away, no longer smiling, recoiling from his severity. She walked quickly away. Jesse watched her and saw her on the other side of the street, in a jumble of people, glance back at him once and then turn away.
She disappeared.
“Who was that? Why did we stop?” Jeanne whined.
Jesse stooped to pick her up in his arms, feeling he must comfort her. He was strangely excited. His mood was mixed up somehow with the whirling of the bright cool air and the hodge-podge of people around them, all of them strangers. No one knew. No one had seen.
He carried his daughter the half block to Leventhal’s office, talking in their private “pet-talk” to her, which pleased her and put all fear out of her mind.
The next morning. Seven forty-five. He was going over an unpleasant case with Dr. Perrault in Perrault’s office at the hospital.
At first Perrault sat facing the window, stubborn and squinting in the sunshine. He was a thin man with a cast of features that put Jesse in mind of a statue—a death mask, something from an earlier century, rigidly preserved. Very neat, thinning dark hair, combed back from his sizable forehead, always moist, as if he had just flicked a wet comb through it. There were pale but rather prominent veins on his temples, which jerked as he squinted into the sunlight. Finally he sneezed. Then he shoved his chair angrily over to the window and turned his back to the light. But now Jesse had to shade his eyes in order to look at Perrault.
“I am forcing you to go blind, eh?” Perrault said. He had a husky voice. “Excuse me. I sometimes forget that I’
m not alone. It’s just as my wife says—I forget that I’m not alone in the universe.”
He moved his swivel chair impatiently over to the wall.
“Is that better?” he asked.
“Everything is fine,” Jesse said.
“Oh—fine! Yes, everything is fine. Of course.”
He let his hand fall heavily on the folder in his lap. A small bitter smile showed itself fleetingly. Perrault had handsome firm lips, the lower lip especially strong. His chin might have been the chin of a much larger man. There was a tightness about it, a severity, that made Jesse think Perrault was always holding himself back, holding his words back.
“Well,” Jesse said hesitantly, “there has been some improvement.… He should be dead by now.”
“Yes. Improvement. That is what we mean by improvement,” Perrault said slowly.
He had a deep, throaty voice, almost a whisper. Out of that intimate voice his soul sometimes leaped: Jesse tried not to flinch.
“We knew … we knew before we operated.…” Jesse said. There were certain words that were always spoken. Saying them was a ritual, a way of growing older. A way of growing fatherly.
Roderick Perrault smiled ironically at Jesse, as if he guessed that Jesse’s thoughts and this burden of knowledge, this burden of omniscience, were painful to him. He seemed always to know everything. The skin of his head had tightened with the irony of his total knowledge, emphasizing his small, shrewd, monkeyish skull.
“Yes, we knew before we operated,” Perrault said softly. “But either a man dies or he does not die. Nature rebels against these twilight states; there is something obscene and confusing about them. They violate our definitions of reality. Improvement is not a definition. It is a joke, a gag-line. We have improved the man into a swine so that he might lay himself down among the other swine in contentment. Is that what we want, Jesse?”
Jesse stared. The sound of his name on this man’s lips—the famous Dr. Perrault, who called no one by his first name—Jesse was Perrault’s Chief Resident at LaSalle; he had been awarded this position over at least eight other third-year residents he knew about who had been anxious to assist Perrault, and certainly there had been other applicants he had known nothing about.
“Here. Read this again,” Perrault said, handing him the folder.
Jesse had no need to read it, since he had written up most of it. But he opened the folder obediently and scanned the material.
Statsky William. 48. Subarachnoid hemorrhage … a right posterior communicating artery aneurysm … two days later a second hemorrhage.…
Perrault had performed a clean little miracle of a craniotomy; Jesse had assisted him, an eager pair of hands and an eager pair of eyes, precise as a machine. Another resident had stood by. Hours had passed timelessly, drained away like the bright blood, Perrault’s instruments flashing and darting in the intricate maze of a man’s brains. Jesse had been hypnotized by the performance.
And now—
A mute patient. Leaden skin. Eyes that would not focus, would not see. Akinetic with left hemiparesis. Intracranial occlusion.… Pages of melancholy news. Isotope cisternographies, looking like fingerprints blotted with too much ink. Jesse leafed through the report and felt a terrible weariness rise in him.
“And Mrs. Statsky.…” Perrault muttered.
He took out a crumpled white handkerchief and blew his nose.
“People live. People die. But in between, in between these two states, they cry out against nature itself, they are obscene and most destructive to a happy interpretation of the universe. I do not wonder at Mrs. Statsky’s hatred of me.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” Jesse said at once.
Statsky was the owner of an aluminum company, called Standard Aluminum Products. Over the past several weeks Jesse had spent so much time in Statsky’s room that he had begun to feel himself a member of Statsky’s big, gregarious, wealthy family, the college kids showing up blunt and breezy in their camel’s-hair coats, the sisters teary-eyed and vicious, the wife overcome by furs of cerulean mink, ermine, whatever exotic and foolish skins that were expensive enough for her. Jesse felt how they grabbed at him for his identity, his sympathy, his good will, as if he had some control over Statsky’s bad luck, being so close to the great Roderick Perrault.
“Everyone understands that this is no one’s fault,” Jesse said wearily.
Perrault said nothing. He remained sitting in his swivel chair, hardly moving. Five minutes passed. Another five minutes passed. Jesse adjusted himself to the wait in silence and was prepared for a sudden angry movement on the part of the older man. But Perrault only took a cigarette out of a pack on his desk, moving numbly.
“You don’t smoke?”—the eyebrows lifting in polite, distracted surprise.
“No.”
“Ah, my good little doctor. My better self. My six-foot self,” Perrault said.
He sat for another space of time, without lighting the cigarette. His face was drawn together into a rigid, masklike set of features, terribly lined. Jesse leafed through the folder again, wondering if he had overlooked anything. Here was a story, a short story not yet complete; when would it be complete? Death completed all these reports. A dismissal from the hospital was temporary and unsatisfying, really; only death put an end to questions of health and recovery. There was once a man named Statsky. Two years of high school, educated “on his own.” Partnership in a meat-packing company. Partnership in a paint company. In asbestos siding. In aluminum siding. Married to a woman with a slurry, intimate voice, an ex-beauty, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago stock specialist. Worth ten, fifteen million.
It made no difference.
Perrault was stroking his forehead without affection. He treated himself rudely. After several minutes he glanced at Jesse, as if just remembering him. “Ah,” he said, “you are waiting for our conference on Bruce Dahl.”
Dahl was scheduled to be operated on that morning. He had been in the hospital before; in fact, Jesse had been allowed to do much of the work, the removal of a fast-growing tumor. But the tumor had been seeded out of cancer in the left lung and now it had reappeared in the brain. Perrault had become strangely irritated with Dahl.
“Him again! Him again!” Perrault had muttered.
A peculiar desperation to his voice, an almost flighty, flippant anger.
Jesse had wanted to tell Perrault that it was not Dahl’s fault that the initial operation had been a failure. Enough that he had lost the whole upper lobe of his left lung. Enough that he had survived a vicious postoperative recovery period, dazed and wasted. He had stepped into Perrault’s professional life as a sweet, friendly man, a builder of suburban shopping malls with plans to put great areas of the United States under pavement and temperature-control domes, and his friendliness had subsided in a matter of days to stark, staring, childish pleas to Perrault. Help me. Save me. If it’s a question of money …
He suffered spectacular seizures, convulsions that involved the entire body. First his thumb would begin to twitch, then all his fingers, then his entire hand, then his arm … and so on through the body … and he would have periods of confusion, near blackouts. Though Perrault was always reserved in the presence of his patients and their families, staring much of the time out the window or at the floor, he had been enthusiastic at first about the Dahl case. “I’m going in after it,” he had said. “I’m going to send my boy in after it.” His face had wrinkled up with a muscular, intense joy.
Then it had been discovered that Dahl had cancer in the lung, and Perrault had been crushed as a disappointed lover. He had been betrayed.
It was not likely that the cancer had seeded only a single cell to the brain, so it would be another dark plunge for Perrault, another probable disappointment. He would be left ironic and round-shouldered after hours of work. He had given most of the original job to Jesse and had assisted him, though brusquely, through the long operation. Jesse understood that he had done well, that he had held up well. It d
id not seem fair now that Dahl should be readmitted with the same problem. Another metastatic lesion in the brain! Another! And so quickly!
“I think I’m ready for it,” Jesse said quietly.
“We will make a ritual of it. Mr. Dahl on the first of every month as long as his cash holds out,” Perrault said.
His sarcasm was rude, blunt, painful. Yet Jesse smiled blindly into it, as if into a blazing light. He was Roderick Perrault’s assistant! He told himself this fact a dozen times a day. He woke each morning very early, with a sense of wonderment, a sense of being blessed. All the years of his life had brought him to this, this almost unbelievable good fortune—He admired Perrault, worshipped Perrault. Let the old man say anything. His words did not matter.
Years ago he had hoped only to do a residency in General Medicine and to work in a clinic, probably in Chicago, dealing with multitudes of ordinary sick people. Bulletins from the federal government and from the states argued monthly for the need of such doctors. What a shortage of doctors there was, and how much worse it would be in another decade! Jesse had believed he could manage a clinic. Then, as time passed, he had discovered in himself a growing need, a yearning, for what was most difficult, most challenging. Ordinary sicknesses were cured ordinarily. Ordinary chronic sicknesses continued month after month, year after year, ordinarily. When he put in his time as a surgical assistant he discovered that this kind of work, which had not appealed to him, which was so bloody and private and precise, was what gave him most satisfaction. He had come to the attention of Perrault himself. A few words of praise by one of the surgeons, someone’s surprise at Jesse’s thoroughness.… He had been drawn into Perrault’s circle, unresisting.
The inviolable nature of the operating room fascinated him. The timelessness, the intimacy, the conversational bickering and joking that showed how trivial human language was, after all, compared to the work of a surgeon’s hands … the way the self was concentrated, fiercely, in the fingertips.… When he operated under Perrault’s guidance he felt his own fingers drawing out of himself his deepest, numbest, least personal self, and out of the older man, power that was pure control, unimagined until this time.
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