Doctors (54 page)

“Indeed I did.”

“And?”

“And that’s the end of it.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that the discussion was so stimulating it lasted all night.”

Palmer grinned. “Laura, darling, that’s the sort of report I’m always getting from you. Your lovely green handwriting says you’re due off duty at eleven and then you appear at dawn, and just toss off some line about having an emergency. What if I told you that we had a little crisis—the appendix of Professor Fairbank’s book fell out and we used heroic efforts to suture it together.”

“If that’s supposed to be a joke, I’m not laughing.”

“Laura, I’ve not been laughing since the second week of your residency. I am by nature a gregarious person. Of course, you’re the person I’d most like to be around but you seem to be in scarce supply. Therefore, when some of the lads in the seminar suggested we go out for a few beers, I joined them.”

“Didn’t you even try to call?”

“Yes, darling, I did. I tried you every half hour from eleven-thirty onward. There was no answer at the house and the hospital switchboard couldn’t locate you. Finally I just gave up and accepted a fellow student’s invitation to sleep on the couch.”

“You’re very vague about this student’s gender, Palmer.”

“Do I ask you about your fellow doctors’ gender?”

“Cut this sophistry, goddammit,” she exploded. “You know my job requires me to be on duty all night long. It’s not the same thing.”

“Excuse me, but from my standpoint it is. Did you enjoy your solitary sleep last night?”

“Of course not, I was—”

“You were feeling what I feel almost every night,” he interrupted.

“Come off it, Palmer, don’t tell me you didn’t know how residents and interns live—if you can call it living. Do you think I actually enjoy being so dizzy from lack of sleep that I can barely see straight? I’m not some kind of masochist.”

“That’s two of us,” he countered. “You don’t enjoy your night shifts in the hospital and I don’t either.” He paused, then added, “My classmates are all married, having kids—and having fun. Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes I’m living like a hermit. In a nutshell, Laura, I will not go on this way.”

They stood there like two people on opposite banks of an ever-widening river.

At last she spoke. Her voice was weary. “Obviously I won’t give up the hospital.”

“Obviously.”

“So what do you propose as an alternative?”

“Well, I think if we want to stay together, we’ll have to decide on some sort of compromise, some modus vivendi.”

“On the contrary, Palmer. I think you’ve already made the decision for both of us.” She took a breath and then asked, “So where exactly were you last night?”

He answered, with no apparent emotion, “Getting laid.”

“Incurable” is almost a taboo word in the medical vocabulary. Though most doctors can pronounce the word “terminal,” they seem allergic to the special connotation of “incurable.” It somehow seems to reflect pejoratively upon them. It’s also dangerous. Relatives of the unfortunate patient might have the temerity to ask, “
Why
can’t you cure him, Doctor?”

In ancient days the poor unfortunates who contracted leprosy were exiled, isolated from the rest of all humanity—and not only for their awful aspect or the terror of contamination, but also because society prefers to hide mistakes that simply will not disappear.

Leprosy can nowadays be cured quite easily with Dapsone. But it has its modern analogue in mental illness.

Though psychiatry is more compassionate in this regard. Its wards are carefully divided into “curables” and “chronics”: those for whom the only therapy is a lethean medication like
Thorazine, and others who might possibly be rescued from the dusky cavern of delusion.

Barney Livingston began his psychiatric residency that July of 1963 by being exposed to the psychotic (read “incurable”) section of Bellevue Hospital. Like every neophyte he had hopes of helping all the sick of soul. Thus when he pushed open the door of the Blenheim Ward, he did not see an overcrowded museum of waxwork figures. He did not see five dozen people, each of whom was living all alone inside a private world. Instead he looked on it in the manner Dante gazed upon the souls in purgatory, determined that he would help them leave.

One thing struck him almost immediately. At this moment the streets of Manhattan were hot enough to melt the asphalt, and yet the vast majority of inmates here were dressed like King Lear for the tornadoes of the heath.

He reminded himself that chronic schizophrenics often wear winter clothing all year round in terror that it might be stolen or—still more unlikely—lost in this warehouse of a room.

Psychiatry is often dubbed “the talking cure.” But Barney realized why
this
patchwork quilt of persons had been thrown together.

They were silent.

Now and then there was the sound of shuffling feet. A cough. A sneeze. But even these were rare. The inhabitants seemed mute. Or else humming to themselves some otherworldly mantra.

It was bizarre, none of them seemed to acknowledge the existence of another. His arrival did not catch even a single pair of eyes. Good God, he thought, how could people get this way?

A huge, muscular black man, wearing a white shirt open at the neck, came up to him.

“You look a bit lost, Doctor,” he said amiably.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Livingston,” he greeted his interlocutor, obviously the ward attendant.

“Yes, Doctor, we’ve been looking forward to your arrival. Let me guide you to the nurses’ office.”

“Thanks,” Barney said, but his eyes kept darting left and right.

Passing through a set of double doors they saw to their right a gray-haired man, his head leaning toward his left shoulder, the fingers of his left hand dancing, his right hand moving back and forth across his left forearm.

“That’s Ignatz,” the black man explained, “he’s practicing.”

“Oh,” said Barney. And then he worked up the courage to ask, “Practicing what?”

“Why, Doctor, don’t you see his Stradivarius?”

“Oh, sure, sure. It’s just I had a little trouble hearing it.”

“Ah, but Doctor, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter …’ ”

Barney smiled in appreciation. “Very apt,” he said admiringly. “John Keats—himself a doctor. By the way,” he added, holding out his hand, “I still don’t know your name.”

“Oh,” the black man said, “I would have thought they’d told you in the palace.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t you know that Pontius Pilate plans to crucify me?”

“Jesus Christ!” said Barney, momentarily off balance.

“Yes, my son. And when I see my Father on Friday night I’ll put in a good word for you.”

Suddenly an irate voice shouted out, “Mr. Johnson—what have you been telling that young doctor?”

The big man turned to what seemed to be—at least Barney hoped—the ward head nurse, who was marching toward them shaking an admonitory finger at his guide.

He whispered to Barney, “Beware, my son! That woman is a succubus—she’s Satan in a female form.”

At this point, the nurse reached them. “Good morning,” she said. “I’m Jane Herridge. You must be Dr. Livingston.”

“Dr. Livingston?” the black man said with fascination. “Then
I
must be Henry Stanley.”

“Now, Mr. Johnson, you go off and spin your tales and let me talk to Doctor here. He’ll come and visit you again, I’m sure.”

The nurse led Barney away, all the while assuring him that Mr. Johnson’s multifaceted delusions were quite harmless.

“Actually he doesn’t live here, he’s from the acute ward. But he sort of acts as an unofficial orderly. We’re very short-handed. And he’s so outgoing and has such a way with people.”

Probably because he
is
so many people, Barney thought to himself. He looked over his shoulder at the looming figure of Mr. Johnson, who now lifted his arm in valediction.

“ ‘O now, forever, farewell the tranquil mind!’ ”

“That’s Shakespeare,” Barney confided to the nurse. “But I’ll be damned if I can remember what play.”

From afar off, the great man cried, “
Othello
, act three, scene three, line three hundred and fifty-one!”

A moment later they were safely sheltered behind the almost soundproof glass of the nurses’ station, sipping coffee from paper cups with plastic holders.

“That guy’s some kind of genius,” Barney remarked.

The nurse replied, “Doctor, I think the saddest thing about this ward is all the wasted talent that’s imprisoned here. And I don’t mean by bolts and bars. It’s locked deep inside them. And there’s nothing to be done.”

“Are you sure—?”

Mrs. Herridge interrupted him. “Please, Dr. Livingston. I mean no disrespect, but every summer a new resident comes on this ward and thinks he’ll turn it into some institute of higher studies. But the truth is that it’s just a loony bin and they’re so far gone that they can’t fend for themselves in the outside world.”

She took him on a tour of the “facilities.” The prisonlike windows were not new to him, nor were the rooms with padded walls. (He could not bring himself to speak of them as “cells.”) But what astonished him was where they slept. Their dormitory was like a bunkhouse in a summer camp, but instead of half-a-dozen beds there were—“How many, nurse?”

“Sixty,” she replied. “This was only built for forty, but you know our problems.”

Barney wondered if he did. Was there an epidemic of madness in the world?

“How do you treat them?” he asked.

“Well, we don’t exactly ‘treat’ them, Doctor. We just try to get them through the day. Believe me, it’s quite a task to wake up sixty patients, from sixty different planets, march them into breakfast—”

“March?”

“Well, not exactly. But we do try to get them standing two by two. They’re easier to manage.”

“Like Noah’s Ark,” he said absently. And then he asked, “What comes after that?”

“For those that can make
some
communication, we’ve got arts and crafts. We’ve even tried a dance class now and then. But most of them just stand around and do … whatever you just saw them doing till it’s time to eat. Then they get their medication and that’s it.”

“That’s it?”

A look of impatience crossed the head nurse’s face. “Dr. Livingston, there are sixty of them and eight of us—and that’s
including Mr. Johnson. We have to keep them sedated or it would be sheer chaos.”

Barney nodded. “If it isn’t too much trouble, could I go through some of the case histories?”

“Certainly,” she answered, and led him back to her office.

Holy shit! Even after a cursory glance at the records, Barney was stupefied by the quantity of drugs these patients were receiving.

“God,” he said to the head nurse, “even Superman would fall asleep on the doses that you’re giving these poor people.”

Mrs. Herridge did not answer—just glanced at him from the corner of her eyes. He began to think she was looking him over, perhaps examining
him
for traces of psychosis.

“Is something wrong, Mrs. Herridge?”

“No, Doctor. I’m just surprised that you’d want to spend so much time reading those histories.”

“Well, that’s my job, isn’t it?” Barney replied.

“Well, if you actually read the complete files of everybody in this ward your rotation would be over. Most of them have been with us for as long as I can remember. Mrs. Ridley would be celebrating her twenty-fifth anniversary here—if there were some way we could let her know.”

And Barney thought to himself, But what if whatever they had that brought them here wasn’t as bad as what they turned into just by
being
here?

“Mrs. Herridge, can you tell me if anyone has ever been released from this ward?”

“Not in the usual hospital sense, Doctor. I mean, they’re mostly elderly and—”

“—just dying to get out, eh?”

He thought he detected a movement of her facial muscles, the fleeting manifestation of a proto-smile.

But she glanced impatiently at her watch. “If you’ll excuse me, Doctor, I’ve got to see that everything’s in order.”

Barney nodded. To make sure all the inmates are drugged up to their eyeballs?

He rose politely. “I guess I ought to go, too. I’ll be in early tomorrow morning and make a fresh start.”

But he was concealing the real truth: he was genuinely frightened of being left alone among the ghosts of living human beings.

He followed several paces behind the head nurse, trying to keep his gaze on her footsteps.

Just as they were arriving at the far end of the gigantic hall, he heard a sound—like a whine—that, though lacking words, still struck him as a kind of plea.

He stopped and slowly turned toward the left. There was a youngish man—at least he seemed not as antiquated as the other patients.

Motionless, he stood emitting intermittent moans. And staring into space.

Then something happened.

Their eyes met. At least Barney thought they had made contact.

And, for a fleeting instant, he sensed a glimmer of recognition.

Did this man know him? Had they ever met beyond these walls—out in the world?

As he stood puzzled, Mrs. Herridge said quite audibly, as if she assumed the patients, if not deaf, were at least uncomprehending, “Pay no attention, Doctor. He’s a tragic case—tried to kill his wife and children. Dreadful story. Shall we go?”

Barney began to walk toward the guard at the door. But before he left, he stole a furtive glance at the groaning man and repeated to himself, I swear to God I know that guy.

Theoretically, Bennett Landsmann had the last two weeks of August free, to catch his breath, some sleep—or even a fish or two.

A few years earlier, Herschel and Hannah had bought a summer house at Truro on Cape Cod. Hoping that it would make their son feel more at ease when he came to visit with a lady friend, they deliberately chose one with a separate guest cottage.

It was here that Bennett had spent the final weeks of August 1958, when he returned from Oxford to begin Med School.

The Landsmanns were overjoyed that he had brought along Robin Winslow, about whom he had written so often. From everything they had gathered, they assumed she was the girl Ben had chosen to marry.