Bitter Medicine (3 page)

“And why that horrible boy?” she wailed. “With anyone but him I could understand it. She never lacked for boyfriends—so pretty, so lively, she could pick from boys who wanted her. But she chooses this—this garbage. No education. No job.
Gracias a Dios
her father didn’t live to see it.”

I said nothing, certain that this blessing had been heaped on Consuelo’s head—“Your father would turn in his grave”; “If he hadn’t died already, this would
kill him”—I knew the litany. Poor Consuelo, what a burden. We sat again in silence. Whatever I had to say could bring no comfort to Mrs. Alvarado.

“You know that black man, that doctor?” she asked presently. “He is a good doctor?”

“Very good. If I couldn’t have Lotty—Dr. Herschel—he would be my first choice.” When Lotty first opened her clinic she’d been
esa judía
—“that Jew”—first, then the doctor. Now, the neighborhood depended on her. They went to her for everything, from children’s colds to unemployment problems. With time, I supposed, Tregiere would also be looked on as a doctor first.

It was six-thirty before he came out to us, accompanied by another man in scrubs and a middle-aged priest. The skin on Malcolm’s face was gray with fatigue. He sat down next to Mrs. Alvarado and looked at her seriously.

“This is Dr. Burgoyne, who’s been looking after Consuelo since she got here. We couldn’t save the baby. We did what was possible, but the poor thing was too little. She couldn’t breathe, even with a respirator.”

Dr. Burgoyne was a white man in his mid-thirties. His thick dark hair was matted to his head with sweat. A muscle twitched next to his mouth and he was kneading the gray cap he’d taken off, pushing it from one hand to the other.

“We thought if we did anything else to retard labor it might seriously harm your daughter,” he said earnestly to Mrs. Alvarado.

She ignored that, demanding fiercely to know if the baby had been baptized.

“Yes, yes.” The middle-aged priest was speaking. “They called me as soon as the baby was born—your daughter insisted. We named her Victoria Charlotte.”

My stomach lurched. Some age-old superstition about names and souls made me shiver slightly. I knew it was absurd, but I felt uneasy, as though I’d been forced into an alliance with this dead infant because it bore my name.

The priest sat in the chair on the other side of Mrs. Alvarado and took her hand. “Your daughter is being very brave, but she’s scared, and part of her fear is that you are angry with her. Can you see her and make sure she knows you love her?” Mrs. Alvarado didn’t speak, but stood up. She followed the priest and Tregiere to whatever remote recess harbored Consuelo. Burgoyne remained in the waiting room, not looking at me, or at anything. He’d stopped working his cap over, but he had a thin face with mobile, expressive planes, and whatever he was thinking was clearly not pleasant.

“How is she?” I asked.

My voice brought him abruptly back to the present. He jumped slightly. “Are you part of the family?”

“No. I’m their attorney. Also a friend of theirs and of Consuelo’s doctor, Charlotte Herschel. I brought Consuelo in because I was with her at a plant up the road when she got sick.”

“I see. Well, she’s not doing very well. Her blood
pressure went down to the point where I was really worried she might die—that’s when we took the baby so we could concentrate on stabilizing her. She’s conscious now and reasonably stable, but I’m still listing her as critical.”

Malcolm came back into the room. “Yes. Mrs. Alvarado wants to take her back to Chicago, to Beth Israel. But I don’t think she should be moved. Do you, Doctor?”

Burgoyne shook his head. “If her blood values and blood pressure remain this way for another twenty-four hours we can talk about it then. But not now… Will you excuse me? I’ve got another patient I need to look in on.”

He walked away with hunched shoulders. Whatever the hospital administration might feel about treating Consuelo, Burgoyne clearly had taken her situation to heart.

Malcolm echoed my thought. “He seems to have done his best. But the situation was very chaotic up there—it’s hard to come into the middle of a case and know for sure what the progress has been. Hard for me, anyway. I just wish Lotty were here.”

“I doubt that she could have done more than you have.”

“She’s more experienced. She knows more tricks. It always makes a difference.” He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I need to dictate my report while it’s still fresh in my mind…. Can you look after Mrs. Alvarado until the
family gets here? I’m on call tonight at the hospital and I have to get back—I’ve talked to Lotty—she’s standing by if Consuelo’s condition changes.”

I agreed, none to happily. I wanted to get away from the hospital, from my dead namesake, from the smells and sounds of technology indifferent to the suffering people it served. But I couldn’t abandon the Alvarados. I followed Malcolm into the hall, returning his keys and telling him how to find his car. For the first time in hours I wondered about Fabiano. Where was the father of the baby? How great would his relief be to learn that after all there was no baby, no need for a job?

I stood at the emergency entrance for a while after Malcolm left. This wing of the hospital faced open land, with a housing development perhaps a quarter mile away. By squinting it was possible to create the illusion of being on the open prairie. I watched the softening night sky. Summer twilight, with its caressing warmth, is my favorite time of day.

At last I turned sluggish steps back down the corridor toward the waiting room. Close to the doorway I met Dr. Burgoyne coming the other way. He’d put on street clothes, and he walked with his head down, his hands in his pockets.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He looked up, focused on me uncertainly, then recognized me. “Oh, yes—the Alvarados’ attorney.”

“V. I. Warshawski… Look: There’s something I need to know. Earlier today the admissions clerk told me
you weren’t treating Consuelo because you thought she should be moved to a public hospital. Is that true?”

He looked startled. I thought I could see “Malpractice Suit” flash across the mobile ticker-tape of his face.

“When she first came in, I hoped we might be able to stabilize her so that she could get into Chicago and be treated by her own doctor in familiar surroundings. It soon became obvious that wasn’t going to happen. It certainly wouldn’t occur to me to ask a comatose laboring girl about her financial status.”

He forced a smile. “How rumors spread from behind an operating-room door down to the clerical area is a mystery to me. But they always do. And they always end up garbled…. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? I’m pretty beat and I need to unwind a bit before I head home.”

I looked into the waiting room. Mrs. Alvarado hadn’t returned. I suspected the invitation for coffee was in large part a desire to be friendly with the family lawyer to quiet any concerns about negligence or failure-to-treat. But my day with the Alvarados had worn me out and I welcomed a few minutes’ conversation with someone else.

The hospital restaurant was a pleasant improvement over the dingy cafeterias most city hospitals sport. The smell of food made me realize I hadn’t eaten since breakfast twelve hours ago. I had broiled chicken and a salad; Burgoyne picked a turkey sandwich and drank coffee.

He asked what I knew about Consuelo’s medical history and her family’s and pried gently into my relationship with them.

“I know Dr. Herschel,” he said abruptly. “At least I know who she is. I trained at Northwestern, and did my residency there. But Beth Israel is one of the best places to go for high-risk OB training. I was accepted there for one of their house-staff OB slots when I finished my residency four years ago. Even though Dr. Herschel is now only part-time at the hospital, she’s still a bit of a legend.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

He grimaced. “Friendship opened this hospital in 1980. They’ve got about twenty in the Southeast, but this was their first Midwest venture and they were pulling out all the stops to turn it into a showcase. They offered me so much—not just money, but new facilities they were planning—I couldn’t turn it down.”

“I see.” We talked a little longer, but I’d been away from my post for forty minutes. Much as I disliked the duty, I thought I should get back to Mrs. Alvarado. Burgoyne walked me to the bend in the corridor leading back to the waiting room, then headed for the parking lot.

Mrs. Alvarado was sitting motionless in one of the orange chairs when I came into the room. She answered my inquiries about Consuelo with ominous comments on divine providence and justice.

I offered to take her down to the restaurant for
something to eat, but she rejected the offer. She lapsed into silence and sat waiting impassively for someone to come with news of her child. Her dignified quiet had an air of helplessness that got on my nerves—she wouldn’t go to the nurses and demand information on Consuelo; she sat until permission was granted. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to do anything but sit with her sorrow wrapped around her, a sweater on top of her cafeteria uniform.

It was a relief when Carol arrived with two of her brothers around eight-thirty. Paul, a large young man of twenty-two or so, had a heavy, ugly face that made him look like a particularly menacing hoodlum. When he was in high school, I used to spend the summers bailing him out of Shakespeare Station after he’d been picked up on suspicion. It was only when he smiled that his underlying intelligence and gentleness showed.

Diego, three years younger, looked more like Consuelo—small, with fine, slender bones. Carol shepherded them into the room in front of her and went to her mother. What started as a quiet conversation quickly exploded.

“What do you mean you haven’t seen her since Malcolm left? Of course you can see her. You’re her mother. Come on, Mama, this is crazy—you think you have to wait for a doctor’s permission to go to her?” She swept Mrs. Alvarado from the room.

“How is she?” Diego asked me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Malcolm didn’t
leave until he thought her condition had stabilized—I know he talked to Lotty, so she must be holding her own.”

Paul put an arm around me. “You’re a good friend, V.I. You’re like family. Why don’t you go home now, get some rest? We’ll look after Mama—no need for us all to stay.”

Carol returned just then and reiterated his thanks. “Yes, Vic—go on home now—no point in all of us staying—she’s in intensive care, so only one person can go in at a time, and that’s only every two hours. And you know that has to be Mama.”

I was fishing my car keys from my handbag when we heard an eruption outside—a crescendo of shouting coming down the hall toward us. Fabiano stormed into the room, a nurse hurrying behind him. He stopped dramatically in the doorway and turned to the nurse:

“Yes—here they are—this fine family of my wife—my Consuelo—hiding her from me. Yes, indeed.” He stormed up to me. “You! You filthy bitch! You’re the worst of them all! You pulled this trick. You and that Jew-doctor between you!”

Paul grabbed him. “Apologize to Vic—then leave—we don’t want your face in here!”

Straining against Paul’s arms, Fabiano continued to yell at me. “My wife gets sick. She almost dies. And you steal her away. Steal her away without telling me! I find out only from Hector Munoz when I am looking for you after our meeting. You can’t keep me from her.
You think you can trick me—she isn’t really sick—that’s a lie! You’re just trying to keep me from her!”

I felt faintly nauseated. “Yeah, you’re awfully concerned, Fabiano. It’s almost nine o’clock now. It take you seven hours to walk two miles from the plant, or did you sit in the road crying until someone gave you a ride?”

“Spent it in a bar, by the smell,” Diego observed.

“What do you mean? What do you know? All you want to do is keep me from Consuelo. Keep me from my baby.”

“The baby’s dead,” I said. “Consuelo’s too sick to see you. You’d better go back to Chicago, Fabiano. Go back and sleep this off.”

“Yes, the baby’s dead—you killed it. You and your good pal
Lotty.
You’re glad it’s dead—you wanted Consuelo to have an abortion—she wouldn’t, so you trick her and kill the baby.”

“Paul, make him stop. Get him out of here,” Carol demanded.

The nurse, who had been hovering uncertainly in the doorway, spoke up as forcefully as she could. “If you don’t quiet down, you are all going to have to leave the hospital.”

Fabiano continued to yell and writhe. I took his left arm and worked with Paul to frog-march him out the door. We went up the wing leading to the main entrance, the one that held the admitting office and Alan Humphries.

Fabiano was shouting obscenities loudly enough to rouse Humboldt Park, let alone Schaumburg; various people came out into the hall to see the parade go by. To my amazement, Humphries appeared, looking extremely annoyed at the disturbance—I thought he would be long gone to Nautilus training or blackened redfish.

He did a double-take at the sight of me. “You there! What’s going on here!”

“This is the dead baby’s father. He can’t control his grief.” I was panting.

Fabiano had stopped shouting. He was looking at Humphries slyly. “You in charge here, gringo?”

Humphries raised shaped eyebrows. “I’m the executive director, yes.”

“Well, my baby die here, gringo. That’s worth much money, no?” Fabiano assumed a heavy Mexican accent.

“You can speak English,” Paul growled, adding a threat in Spanish.

“He want to hit me because I look out for my wife and my baby,” Fabiano whined to Humphries.

“Come on,” I urged Paul. “Let’s move this garbage. Sorry for the disturbance, Humphries—we’ll get him out of here.”

The administrator waved a hand. “No, no—that’s okay—I can understand—very natural he should be so upset. You come in and talk to me a minute, Mr.—?”

“Hernandez.” Fabiano smirked.

“Now listen, Fabiano—you talk to him, you’re on your own,” I warned him.

“Yeah,” Paul chimed in. “We do not want to see your ass again tonight. And I wish I would never have to see it again, you slime.
Comprendes?
“