Doctors (14 page)

The rest of the party was an exhilarating toboggan ride. Barney chatted briefly and amicably with a few professors, thanked his interviewer—who made an emphatic pitch for orthopedic surgery (“that’s real
man’s
medicine”) and started for the door.

At this point he noticed Laura talking to a tall, handsome student, distinctive not only for his elegant apparel, but also because he was the only black man in the room not carrying a tray.

She caught Barney’s eye and waved him over.

It was en route that Barney suddenly realized who the guy was.

“Barney, I’d like you to meet—”

“No need for fancy introductions,” he interrupted. “I know a superjock when I see one.” Then, looking at her companion, he remarked, “You’re Bennett Landsmann, the meanest runner-and-gunner in Harvard basketball history. I saw you play at Columbia four years ago. You scored something like thirty-two points. Right?”

“Something like that,” the black man said modestly and offered his hand. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t throw it,” Barney riposted. “Anyway, I’m Barney Livingston and I’m happy you had graduated by the time I got on the court against your little college. Which reminds me—how come you’re only starting Med School? Weren’t you two years ahead of us?”

“I guess I’m retarded.” Bennett smiled mischievously.

“Don’t believe him, Barn,” Laura chided. “He was at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.”

“It figures,” Barney said. Then he asked Bennett, “Did you know there’s a gym in the basement of this overgrown mausoleum? Want to meet sometime and throw a few?”

“Gladly,” Bennett replied. “In fact, a reliable source informs me that there’s usually a pickup game at five-thirty. Why don’t we check it out?”

“Okay, great,” Barney agreed enthusiastically.

“See you there,” Bennett said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gave my solemn oath to Dr. Dowling that I’d listen to his sales pitch for orthopedics.”

Barney watched as Bennett Landsmann moved gracefully through the crowd and thought to himself, I wonder how it feels to be the only black man in the class. I’ll bet underneath that air of relaxed charm he must be lonely as hell. Or angry. Or both.

Before he departed, Barney met a few more classmates, among whom was Hank Dwyer, a soft-spoken, porcelain-featured grad of Holy Cross, originally from Pittsburgh. He had been studying for the priesthood when he had suddenly experienced the call to be a doctor—but it was clear he still harbored ambivalent feelings.

“Well,” Barney offered, “you have the precedent of Saint Luke.”

“Yeah,” Dwyer agreed, smiling wryly, “that’s what I told my mother. She still doesn’t like the idea. In our family, religion is more important than anything.”

“What happens if anyone gets sick?”

“You go to church and pray for their recovery.”

“Suppose they’re dying?”

“Then you call a priest to give them last rites.”

Barney somehow felt that the young man’s urge to exchange white collar for white coat had been inspired by more than a desire to heal. For he noticed Hank’s stolen glances at the incomparable Miss Andersen.

Barney left just before seven and rushed upstairs to don a sportier outfit. He was back downstairs at seven-twenty-four to make certain of being strategically placed when Grete the Great appeared.

Anticipation had sharpened his thoughts. He now realized
that taking this Venus de Milo to a mere pizzeria would be like inviting the Queen of England to Dunkin’ Donuts.

No, this was not an opportunity that was likely to come his way a second time.
Think
, Livingston, where can you take her that’s got a little more atmosphere—and class?

How about the Copley Grille—nice wood paneling, subdued lighting?

But that would blow twenty bucks for sure. Maybe more, if she liked martinis.

He played over in his mind Warren’s “paternal” lecture to him on the day before he left for Boston.

His younger brother had assiduously composed a balance sheet and pronounced, “I’ve got all your expenses worked out, Barn. And I think if interest rates hold up—and you don’t go wild buying a car or something—you’ve got enough dough to carry you all four years. Tuition’s a thousand a year, you’ve got the cheapest dorm room—three hundred and forty dollars for rent—and your meals will run two-fifty per semester—”

“I still say I’d rather cook in my room.”

“No way, read the catalogue. All first-year guys have to eat in the dining hall. But if you only go to the movies once a week—”

“Can I afford to take a date?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Warren said, smiling indulgently, “you can even spring for two orders of popcorn. Anyway, assuming another hundred and fifty for travel and miscellaneous, you can probably make it for just under three thousand dollars a year.”

Dammit, Warren—why didn’t you have a contingency plan for sex-bombs?

To hell with it, Barney thought, if I can impress this chick on the first date, I’ll gladly starve for a week.

Then he glanced at his watch. It was already eight-fifteen and Grete still hadn’t shown. But he waited faithfully, his only company being the legendary physicians in Harvard’s history—who appeared to be scrutinizing him from the nearby portraits on the walls.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a former dean of the Med School, heretofore known better to Barney for his poetry, seemed to be upbraiding him with some of his own immortal lines. “To crawl is not to worship; we have learned a drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee.…”

In other words, what kind of schmuck are you to wait this long for any girl?

Calls to Grete’s room proved fruitless. Everyone was out enjoying this last night of freedom. By now Barney was tired, hungry and frustrated. But most of all confused. Why the hell had she given him that high-calorie come-on if she hadn’t wanted to go out? And she could have canceled, pleading tiredness or something. He was about to put his fist through a portrait of Dr. John Warren (1753–1815) when Palmer and Laura appeared.

“What’re you doing down here alone, Barn? I thought you had a date with Grete.”

“So did I. I guess she got a better offer.”

“Why don’t you join us for a bite to eat?” Palmer offered in genuine sympathy. “Come on, food is the next best thing to you-know-what.”

Barney smiled appreciatively. As he rose and walked out with them, he inwardly conceded, Castellano was right. Palmer
is
a nice guy.

The next thing he knew he had been crammed into the middle of a Porsche and was zooming toward Jack and Marion’s, where Laura insisted he order the gargantuan chocolate cake. “A little carbohydrate-induced hyperglycemia really lifts the mood.”

Inwardly she was more troubled than Barney, who by the tenth mouthful had all but shrugged off his feelings of slighted masculinity. I’ve got to live with this sex-bomb, she told herself—I hope she doesn’t drive
me
crazy.

Back in the lobby of Vanderbilt, Laura dispatched Palmer with: “You’re at liberty till next Saturday, pal.”

“Under protest,” Palmer conceded, “but I’ll call you.” And moving off he waved to both of them, “Ciao, doctors.”

Now Laura and Barney were alone.

“Hey, thanks, Castellano. My ego was pretty anemic till you came along. Anyway, I think Talbot’s a terrific guy.”

“Yeah,” Laura remarked as she started toward her room. “He’s probably too good for me.”

I
f the previous night’s sherry party had been intended to polish the hard, gemlike egos of the aspiring physicians, the next morning’s welcoming lecture by Dean Courtney Holmes shattered them in short order.

They had been astonished to hear that even the most brilliant doctors (like Holmes himself) had such woefully inadequate knowledge of the ills that beset the human body that they possessed an empirical cure for only
twenty-six
of them.

Were they really about to slave for at least another five years to enter a profession that was ninety-eight percent guesswork?

The neophytes were still glassy-eyed as they lined up in the cafeteria for their noontime gruel.

Laura whispered to Barney that she felt gender-bound to join the four other girls, who had already appropriated an exclusive table for the “Honorary Men.” He nodded, looked around the cafeteria, saw Bennett Landsmann, and decided to sit with someone he already knew.

Moments later Hank Dwyer joined them, still expressing his bewilderment at Holmes’s peroration.

“Are we supposed to
know
all those incurable diseases he rattled off? I mean I haven’t even heard of some of them.”

He was answered by a classmate sitting on his own at the far end of the table. “How did you ever get accepted to this place? Holmes only cited the most basic medical mysteries—you know, the kind our future research—at least mine—is destined to solve.”

The nasal, condescending voice belonged to Peter Wyman.

“Is this character for real?” Barney whispered to Bennett.

“I hope not,” his neighbor replied. But Wyman continued to pontificate.

“Shall I start with leukemia and diabetes or can I assume you at least know something about leukocytes and the pancreas?”

“I know he’s a goddamn pain in the pancreas,” Barney whispered.

“Just what makes you so smart?” Hank demanded of Wyman.

“I’d say heredity, environment, and study,” Peter replied.

“What’s your name?”

“Peter Wyman, Ph.D., M.I.T., summa cum laude. And yours?”

“Henry X. Dwyer, S.J.—dropped out.”

“You made the right choice, Dwyer,” Peter commented paternally. “The only true religion is science.”

As Dwyer fumed, Barney whispered to Bennett, “I think the priest is gonna punch the pedant.”

As Wyman prated on and on, the rest of the table fell silent. They were trying to steel themselves. For in less than thirty minutes they would begin the first of their four hundred and fifty-five required hours of gross anatomy. Those who had taken Comparative Anatomy at college and had dissected frogs and rabbits tried to pretend that the species
homo sapiens
would be a similar exercise. Others had worked part-time in hospitals and had seen corpses. But none had ever put a knife into real flesh and sliced open a human body.

The first thing they noticed was the smell.

Even before they saw the rows of bodies, wrapped in plastic like so many elongated stuffed cabbages.

“Jesus,” Laura whispered to Barney, “I can barely breathe.”

“We’ll get used to it,” he murmured back. “That’s the stuff that keeps the bodies from decaying.”

“Kind of a paradox, isn’t it,” suggested Maury Eastman, “that we, who have come to preserve the living, must first preserve the dead.”

“Bullshit,” Barney snapped. He was too edgy to indulge in frivolous banter.

Unflustered, the self-appointed heir to Chekhov’s mantle continued to philosophize.

“I wonder which of us it will be. You know, in every class there are guys who can’t take this part. Some of them throw up or faint. I’ve even heard of one or two who walked out of the room and quit Med School completely.”

Shut the hell up, Barney kept thinking. We’re
all
wondering how we’ll cope.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” called a balding, white-coated
figure as he scurried through the double doors in the far corner. It was Professor Charles Lubar, their guide through the human labyrinth.

“I’m especially pleased to be leading our expedition into the mysteries of the human body during this of all semesters, since it is precisely a hundred years ago that Henry Gray published the
Anatomy
which still serves as our basic text. We’ve assigned four of you to each table. There are name cards. Take your instruments and find your places. As soon as you’re set up we can begin.”

Barney and Laura had hoped they would be assigned to the same body. But it was not to be. Barney quickly found his station at a nearby table, while Laura went on to search for hers. She cast him a parting glance of helplessness.

“Stay loose, Castellano,” he called after her quietly, “it’ll be okay.” She merely nodded and moved off.

Barney was happy to find that Bennett was one of the other two students sharing his cadaver (in fact the trio itself was lucky, since all of the other tables had a quartet of anatomists). Barney nodded across the acrid-smelling form of what (according to the tag tied around his foot) had been a fifty-six-year-old man who had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage.

At the next table another of their classmates studied his tag and remarked, “I think we’ve got a lousy stiff, guys—cancer. Must have guts like a junk heap.” His remark met with disapproving stares from both Bennett and Barney.

“Hey,” he protested apologetically, “I’m a little nervous, that’s all. Forget what I said, okay?”

“Okay,” said Barney. Bennett nodded his agreement.

The third member of their team was a short, bespectacled, frizzy-haired girl whom Barney deduced to be Alison Redmond (Laura had already spoken of the diminutive Bryn Mawr superbrain from St. Louis). She arrived just as Professor Lubar was beginning the traditional homily.

“First, I want all of you to look at the description of the person you are about to dissect. It’s highly unlikely, but if you feel there is any chance it may be someone you know, please don’t hesitate to ask to be transferred.…”

God, Barney thought, that never even occurred to me. Someone I
know
—that would really be grotesque. And then a terrifying, irrational fantasy crossed his mind. What if this were my father!

“All right, gentlemen,” Lubar continued, “now I want to
be unequivocal on this next point. The bodies before you were once living, breathing,
sentient
human beings. They were generous enough to leave their bodies to science so that, even in death, they could serve mankind. I want you to treat these people with respect. If I see any horseplay or fooling around, I’ll kick the perpetrator right out of this course. Is that understood?”

There were murmurs of assent.

Now, in a less cautionary tone, he continued, “Every anatomist has his own idea of where to begin the study of the human body. Some start with the most familiar area—the epidermis or surface epithelium—and work their way through the skin, layer by layer. But I believe in getting right to the heart of the matter.”