Butterfly (35 page)

be willing to go, just to do you a favor.”

But Ann sadly shook her head. “I tried that when I was nineteen. The guys I asked all

thought I was on the make, as if going to one dance with me meant we were engaged or

something. It scared them off. Well, this has certainly turned out to be a doubleheader of

a day!”

“You want me to
what?”
Roy Madison said that afternoon during the brief postlunch

lull.

Beverly was sitting at his table, sharing a plate of jalapeño french fries that were on the

house. She ate three; Roy polished off the rest. “I was wondering if you would take a

friend of mine to a Christmas dance.”

“Who?”

“One of my neighbors in my apartment building.”

“Why can’t she get her own date? Is she ugly?”

“She’s a very nice girl.”

Roy looked down at his hands. This was by no means the first time someone had tried

to set him up with a blind date. His mother and sisters were doing it all the time. Because

he couldn’t possibly tell them they were wasting their time, that he just wasn’t interested

in girls—they didn’t know about his boyfriends—he usually had to suffer through

evenings with girls anxious to get engagement rings. He hated it.

“I’m sorry, Bev. I just don’t think I want to.”

“Is it because you’re homosexual?”

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149

Roy snapped his head up so sharply that his neck made a sound. He couldn’t speak at

first. Then he said, “Holy shit, Bev. What are you talking about? How do
you
know

about…that kind of thing?”

Ironically, she had first met homosexual men at Hazel’s. They went there to try to get

themselves straightened out. Once in a while a young man would come afflicted with

doubts and would buy a woman to prove to himself he was a real man. They all ended up

talking, believing that their words fell on sympathetic ears. After all, prostitutes were just

as persecuted as homosexuals were. And so Beverly had heard nearly every story.

“Listen, Roy,” Beverly went on in her quiet, serious way, “Ann Hastings isn’t looking

for a boyfriend. This is just a fantasy. That’s all it is. And we need you to help her live it

out.”

All Roy Madison could do was sit and stare at the ever-perplexing Beverly. Just when

you thought you had her all figured out, she pulled something like this. “How did you

know?” he asked quietly, looking around. “I mean, does it
show?
”

“I don’t think anyone else suspects, Roy.”

“Then how did
you
know?”

“Roy, Ann Hastings is lonely and unhappy,” Beverly said, avoiding his question the

way she sometimes did when she didn’t want to tell the truth and couldn’t tell a lie. “The

party is a family affair, and she desperately wants to show off in front of a certain cousin.

With you at her side she’d cause a sensation.”

His eyes flickered to the polished chrome of the jukebox. “You think so?”

“You’re an actor, Roy. Think of this as a part.”

“Hey,” he said slowly, a smile spreading across his face. “Not a bad thought.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“Wait a minute. What’s in it for me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this girl gets to put one over on her friends and relatives, what do I get out of

it? I mean, if she wants to hire me to play a part, then I think she should pay me.”

“Pay you?”

“Yeah. Why not? I’m an actor, aren’t I? And you’re hiring me to act, aren’t you?”

Beverly studied him. Actually, she thought, why not? For her money, Ann would be

escorted by the best-looking man at the dance, she would no doubt be the envy of her

Fabian-loving friends, and she would get Roy’s undivided attention because there was no

danger of his flirting with other girls.

“All right,” she said. “You’ll be paid.”

Roy was a success.

Ann didn’t need much persuasion to get her to agree to the thirty dollars. Once she

took one look at Roy, when she started as a waitress at the diner the next day, the deal was

sealed. And when he arrived at her apartment dressed to the hilt, holding out an orchid

corsage and driving Eddie’s new Edsel, Ann decided it would have been worth a
hundred

dollars.

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Kathryn Harvey

But the capper came at the party. Her snobbish Uncle Al had hired valets to park cars

up and down the street, and even had a local band to play variations of the twist. The girls

wore showy beaded crop tops and tight skirts, or Jackie Kennedy A-lines with bubble

hairdos and stylish pointed-toed shoes. Ann had done her best in a simple Empire dress

with the required long gloves. Janet Hastings greeted her cousin and was about to make a

remark on the wonderfully slimming lines of the dress when she set eyes on the hunk Ann

had arrived with.

He was like nothing she or any of her friends had ever seen before. While all their

escorts wore black suits with white shirts and narrow ties, their hair slicked with Wildroot

cream-oil into perfect pompadours, Ann’s date wore chinos and a bulky cable-knit fisher-

man’s sweater, and his dusty blond hair just sort of fell naturally, over his forehead and the

top of his shirt collar, giving him a kind of shy, vulnerable look that melted almost every

feminine heart at the dance. By evening’s end, most of the girls were clustering around the

intriguing Roy and trying to catch his eye. But he only had eyes, to their great astonish-

ment, for the chubby Ann, which caused some of the guys at the party to wonder what it

was she had to snare such a boyfriend like Roy. By the time she left she had given her

phone number to four of them.

One morning a few days later Roy came into the crowded diner and ordered two

Royals with extra cheese. Beverly was making a fuss over a customer’s baby, tickling it and

holding it up in the air, so he put “El Paso” on the jukebox and that got her attention. It

always did.

“Guess what!” he said, coming up to her. “Remember that director I met at Ann’s

cousin’s party? The one who said he liked my style and gave me his card? What do you

think, Bev? He’s offered me a part in a commercial.”

“That’s wonderful, Roy.”

“Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his wallet. “This is for

you.”

Beverly looked down at the ten-dollar bill. “What’s this for?”

“It’s your cut. That thirty was the easiest money I’ve ever made. And I might get a job

out of it, to boot. I owe you for it, Bev.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Roy. I just wanted Ann to be happy.”

“Well, I owe you for my new look as well. Saw my agent yesterday. Her eyes nearly

popped out of her head when I walked into her office. She says she thinks she might have

something for me. So I owe you, Bev.” He pressed the bill into her palm. She kept it.

Beverly went back to the cash register, where people were lined up to pay for their

burgers. She felt the ten-dollar bill in her hand. It was going into the bank that afternoon.

20

“Code trauma major! Code trauma major!” came the voice over the public-address

system.

Linda Markus, about to step into the shower, snapped her head up and looked at the

speaker on the wall.

“Dr. Markus to Emergency!” the voice said. “Dr. Markus to Emergency!”

She picked up the phone, dialed the ER, and said, “I’m on my way.”

After quickly pulling her surgical greens back on, Linda ran out of the on-call room,

where she had hoped to take a shower and grab something to eat, and raced down the

hall. She didn’t bother with the elevator but flew down the fire stairs that delivered her,

moments later, to the service entrance of the Emergency Room.

She found chaos. Nurses and technicians were hurrying about, rooms and beds were

being readied, three residents in white lab coats came flying in, plus one surgeon in a jog-

ging suit. Linda went straight to the emergency department’s radio room. On the receiver

she heard the wail of a siren and the voice of a paramedic shouting, “We’ve got four

patients! Multiple stab wounds!”

“Oh my God,” she said. “A gang fight!” She picked up the microphone and had to

shout into it. “This is Dr. Markus. Can you triage?”

“Three are stabilized, Doctor. But the fourth sustained a stab wound to the left chest.

Blood is spurting, pulse weak and thready, pupils dilated, eyes rolled back…”

“Get an airway down him! Apply pressure pants!” Linda looked at the nurse who had

been monitoring the call. Their eyes met for an instant, then the nurse said into the

microphone, “Estimated time of arrival?”

“Seven minutes.”

“Damn,” whispered Linda. “Can you get an intravenous started?”

“Negative, Doctor. The veins are all collapsed and his jugular’s empty, and—Oh shit!”

“What is it?”

“No pulse!”

Linda and the nurse stared at the radio as they listened to the whine of the ambulance

siren and the rapid exchange between the two paramedics. “Commencing CPR!” one of

them finally shouted.

Linda dashed from the radio room and literally ran into the head nurse. “Get set up

for a thoracotomy,” Linda said. “I’m going to open his chest.”

Six minutes later she heard the sound of the siren outside and heard the voice over the

radio shout, “We’re at your door!”

151

152

Kathryn Harvey

A team rushed outside and began receiving the stretchers just as three police cars came

screeching up. Linda was snapping on her sterile gloves when she heard the thunder of

feet down the hall and the head nurse saying, “Chest wound in here.”

Linda’s scrub nurse had set up the room for an emergency thoracotomy: the sterile

table was laid out with chest-opening knives and rib spreaders, long instruments, piles of

sponges. The team hadn’t had time to do a full scrub: they stood in whatever clothes they

had been wearing when the call came; only their gloved hands were sterile.

The unconscious young man was hastily moved to the operating table; the anesthetist

began at once to monitor his airway. While two pale-faced residents proceeded to cut into

the veins in the boy’s wrists and ankles, a technician stood ready with IV lines, bottles of

saline and units of blood. Linda moved just behind the nurse, who literally poured a bot-

tle of skin antiseptic over the chest; she cut an incision from the boy’s breastbone down

the side and to the back. As soon as the ribs were spread open, blood began pouring out.

Linda reached inside and took hold of his heart. It was empty.

She looked at the boy’s face. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years

old.

He’s so young,
she thought as she desperately squeezed and released the heart.
Please

don’t let him die…
.

The room fell silent. Six grim-faced people watched Dr. Markus as she kept up the

cardiac massage, her arm bloodied up to the elbow, a film of perspiration on her forehead.

Come on,
she pleaded.
Come on, live!

“Might as well pronounce him, Doctor,” the anesthetist said.

She ignored him. She closed her eyes. Half-bent over the unconscious youth, her back

aching, Linda kept up her relentless massage.

“His brain’s been without oxygen for too long—” the anesthetist began.

“Wait,” she said. “I think…”

Linda felt a slight movement in her hand. And then she felt the heart begin to swell.

She turned to the head nurse. “Is OR ready to take him?”

“The heart team said they’re standing by.”

“Tell them he has a lacerated left ventricle. I’ll run a suture…”

Two hours later she was sitting in the doctors’ lounge of the surgical suite. Old Dr.

Cane was dictating orders over the phone, and two surgeons dozed in chairs.

“Linda, you look awful.”

She looked up from the patient’s chart she was writing in, gave Dr. Mendoza a wither-

ing look, and said, “Thanks.”

“Hey, no. I mean it, my friend. You look terrible. You’re working too hard.”

She sighed, closed the chart and settled back into the comfort of the Naugahyde sofa.

The large color TV was tuned in to the six o’clock news; she stared at the screen without

really seeing it.

“Well, José,” she said wearily, “I
am
working too hard. This is my seventh straight day

on ER call.”

BUTTERFLY