Doctors (79 page)

He found himself in the midst of pandemonium. The lines of soldiers and their families stretched far beyond the compound’s high white stuccoed walls. There were children of all ages and widely varied pigmentation. Some of these “Amerasians” were as white as snow and yet had inherited their mothers’ high cheekbones and almond eyes. Those who had been fathered by black soldiers had the golden color of Polynesians.

The sheer number of them was staggering, even more so since the Embassy officials estimated that barely a quarter of the Gl-fathered children had been put on record.

Hank and his colleagues had to wait for several hours in the baking sun to place their unofficial families underneath the protective canopy of the Stars and Stripes.

Naturally, Hank lied. By now it had become a well-honed skill. He did nothing to dispel Mai-ling’s impression that her fate would be like that of her sisters in the villa. She would have to be patient, of course—that was one of the attractive features of these Asian women. But the time would come and Hank would send for her, and they would be together once again.

Not long afterward, Hank received official word that he was being transferred home. Since he had served not one but two entire tours of duty, he could of course be honorably discharged.

But he was much too patriotic—and perplexed—to make so bold a move. And so, to the surprise of his superiors, he asked to be transferred somewhere—anywhere—as long as it was on the
West Coast. This would disengage him from the Vietnamese connection and still enable him to deal long distance with the “situation” back in Boston.

The night before he left Saigon, Hank made a sentimental journey back to Joy Street. He brought a camera with fast film so he could remind himself in later years it had not been a dream.

Some of the neon lights were flashing still. But even those that were aglow seemed to be fading rapidly. The place and its activities were running down.

For old times’ sake he went to Mikko’s, where he had met Mai-ling.

“Hello, Captain,” said the proprietor, grinning. The only thing apparently intact in his establishment was his good humor. “Good to see you. Everybody seems to go now.”

“Yeah,” Hank agreed and looked around at the empty chairs and tables, some piled up for storage. The spotlights that once made the crowded dance floor brighter than day were shut off. Even the jukebox seemed to glow more dimly.

“You want your usual?” asked the proprietor (who was now his own doorman, bartender, waiter, and chef).

“Yeah,” Hank replied distractedly, regretting that he had made this visit, which would cloud his memories of the euphoria he had known when Joy Street was in flower.

He leaned on the bar and looked around.

There still were women. They were not in short supply in a country that had seen a generation of their brothers decimated.

“We have a brand-new girl,” said Mikko, handing Hank his drink. “Fresh from the country. Like a flower. And she virgin. You would like I introduce you?”

Before he could answer, the enthusiastic Mikko was presenting one of his harem to him.

“Captain Dwyer, this is … Dio-xi, but we call her ‘Dixie’ for short.”

“Hello,” said Hank, seeing how exquisite the very young girl was—like some painted cherub or angel on a chapel wall.

“Can I buy you a drink, Dixie?” he asked.

She glanced at Mikko for instructions.

“It’s okay, Dixie, Captain Dwyer’s a friend,” he said kindly. “I’ll make you a ginger ale.”

With Hank’s rudimentary Vietnamese, and Dixie’s broken English, they sat at a table trying to have a conversation. And of course he asked the inevitable question. The old what’s-a-nice-girl-like-you-doing-in-a-place-like-this
gambit. Apparently her village had been overrun—not once but three times. First the Vietcong, then the GIs, and then as soon as the U.S. soldiers left, the Communists took over again. And wrought bloody revenge on those who had collaborated with the Americans.

Her father had been shot. Her mother had been raped and shot. She had hidden in a tree and escaped everything except the worst experience of all: having to watch and feel powerless. And her flight inevitably ended here on Joy Street.

Hank listened, and from somewhere in his well-insulated conscience took pity on the girl.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Sixteen,” she replied.

“How old are you really?” he persisted.

She lowered her head and confessed. “Twelve.”

There was an awkward moment, after which Hank murmured with embarrassment, “I’d like to give you money, Dixie.”

“You must first speak to Mikko about that,” she answered bashfully.

“No, no, no,” he quickly interrupted. “I want to give you money to get out of here. Like maybe find a real job. I know there are even some convent schools where you wouldn’t have to …” He couldn’t even bring himself to say the words.

“You really kind,” she answered softly. “But I cannot.”

“No, no, I insist,” said Hank, and pressed two fifty-dollar bills into her tiny hand. He stood up.

“I’ve gotta go now, Dixie. Take care of yourself, okay?”

She nodded, lacking the emotional vocabulary for the acknowledgment of kindness.

Hank waved to Mikko and walked out into the street.

He had taken barely twenty steps when he discovered that he’d left his camera on the nightclub table. He quickly hurried back. Now there was no one in the bar but—minor miracle—his camera was still there.

Then he heard voices from the corner and glanced over. It was Dixie, handing over everything he’d given her to Mikko.

The jewel in the crown of the U.S. Medical Establishment, the National Institutes of Health, is a twenty-minute drive from the White House, in Bethesda, Maryland. There are sixty-three different buildings, most of which are of red brick. Their tranquil setting resembles a college campus.

Yet the NIH hospital itself is the largest red-brick building in the world, with no fewer than nine miles of corridors.

And genius is the norm.

At least eighty-eight Nobel Prize winners have worked in the area behind the huge hospital, which is dotted with laboratories of all kinds. Here pioneering research goes on three hundred and sixty-five days a year to fight cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, and other more arcane but equally savage afflictions.

The tenured Senior Fellows supervise those lucky enough to have run the difficult gauntlet of application and been appointed for a two- or three-year Junior Fellowship. Selection depends largely on the importance of the proposed research project and the committee’s estimation of whether the applicant is gifted enough to pursue it.

Very few of the Fellows do any work in the hospital. They mostly remain buried in their red-brick labs, peering with electronic microscopes, waiting for a minuscule miracle to swim into their field. Within the profession, they are sometimes jokingly referred to as “Rat Doctors.”

But it is an unassailable fact that a country doctor who trudges five miles in the snow to treat a patient in a log cabin is far better equipped if he is carrying the latest drug discovered in an NIH lab.

Laura Castellano had known that her chance for acceptance as a Research Fellow was particularly small. For working at the NIH could fulfill a doctor’s military obligation. And the average physician preferred Bunsen burners to burning villages.

But Laura’s project also impressed the selecting committee for several important reasons.

First, those still in the process of building a family realized that an early-warning system to detect imminent hemorrhaging in preterm babies might be of genuine value to them personally. Her proposal was sound and pragmatic:

Furthermore, Laura’s project seemed like one that could produce results in a relatively short time and would be useful to cite when Congress deliberated the size of its appropriations to the Institutes.

And yet Laura never knew how close she came to having her application rejected—that it was only the new “Equal Opportunity” laws that saved her.

For as long as anyone could remember, applications for schools, colleges, and civil service jobs had to be accompanied by a photo of the applicant—whereby the ethnic background of a candidate could be revealed.

In this braver, more democratic world created by Congress, candidates were to be judged on their merits alone: it was strictly forbidden for the referees to make any allusion whatsoever in their letters to the candidate’s race or creed.

Of course, it was clear to the blue ribbon committee that Laura Castellano was female—a point in her favor. But the lack of a photograph kept her from being rejected on other grounds: the damning fact that she was beautiful.

For it has been common knowledge since time immemorial that beauty and brains cannot possibly go together. Thus, had the arbiters known what Laura looked like, they would have instantly rejected her as a dumb blonde.

During her final weeks at Queen’s, Laura made the rounds of Toronto’s used car dealers to find herself the wheels that are indispensable for anyone working in the Washington area. Her depression had done wonders for her bank account. All that winter, her obsessive commitment to the neonatal ICU rarely allowed her into the light of day, much less a shop that sold anything more than milk and graham crackers. She had not even picked up a newspaper. Her idea of leisure reading was the
New England Journal.

She was thus able to afford the two thousand dollars “Honest Ernie” was asking for a “slightly pre-used” Chevrolet Nova. Laura was even canny enough to get him to throw in a new set of tires.

On the last day of June she said goodbye to the few friends she had made—two ICU nurses and the cashier at the cafeteria.
She loaded the trunk with her bag and some cartons of books and headed south.

In two hours she had crossed the bridge over the Niagara River into Buffalo, New York, and headed toward Pittsburgh. Only
then
, having long passed the latitude of Boston and New York, did she turn east, stopping only to feed herself and her car.

She reached Washington at sunrise, which made the still-sleeping city look like a travel agent’s poster. A few lines of Wordsworth popped into her head from the distant memories of Midwood English class—“This city now doth like a garment wear/the beauty of the morning.”

After more than a year of unrelieved gloom, she felt hopeful. Maybe Washington would not belie its outward beauty. Maybe she would find happiness here.

Laura had rented an apartment in Bethesda but was too excited to go “home,” even to freshen up. She drove straight to the NIH, where—to her delight—she saw that at 7
A.M.
she was far from the earliest arrival. By noon she was ensconced in her lab and had already started looking over her protocol notes.

As she was taking off her fresh white coat with its tiny blue and white nameplate, she heard a woman inquire after her from across the lab.

“Has Dr. Castellano arrived yet? I have a long-distance call in my office for Dr. Castellano.”

Puzzled, Laura made herself known and followed the secretary to the director’s office where she picked up the phone.

“Hey, Castellano. Welcome back to the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

“Barney! Hey, did you lose my extension number or something?”

“No, Laura,” he whispered at the other end, “this was just a ploy to get you into the director’s office so you could casually meet him—or at least his secretary. Be
real
nice to her—they’re usually the power behind the throne.”

“Dr. Livingston,” she said, now trying to sound as formal as possible, “I don’t believe I should be tying up this phone, so I’ll get back to you sometime this afternoon. Is that all right?”

“Of course—but mark my words, this call will reap dividends. So long.”

As Laura hung up, the secretary inquired, “Friend or colleague?”

She knew the right answer to that one.

“Colleague. Dr. Livingston’s on the faculty at NYU.” As of three months ago, she thought but did not say.

“What sort of research is he engaged in?” the secretary asked politely. It was inconceivable to her that a doctor could actually be treating patients.

“I’m afraid I’m pledged to secrecy,” Laura replied apologetically.

“Oh,” she answered, with undisguised admiration. “I can appreciate that. And it’s quite proper of you not to tell me. My name is Florence, and if you have any problems, just come to me.”

Laura thanked her and headed out, thinking to herself, Florence, you’d flip if you knew that the lab animals in Barney’s research project were not rats or mice or even monkeys. Just doctors.

Laura’s high expectations of Washington were not dispelled. She daily rubbed white-coated shoulders with some of the greatest medical minds in the world. And as far as resources were concerned, there was no book, no journal, no piece of apparatus—however exotic or outlandish—that could not be produced inside of sixty minutes.

And the Institutes did not seem to have that cutthroat atmosphere so characteristic of college campuses. The Juniors knew that they were there for a limited time and were aspiring to get enough done—and results published—so they could obtain tenure at their own universities. This was not like Chem 20, where your neighbor would sabotage your experiment if you so much as looked out of the window for a moment at an autumn leaf.

The two other young pediatricians with whom she shared the lab and its computer were both congenial—and happily married. The proof of this was the swiftness with which they invited Laura to dinner at their homes. They wanted their wives to have an entire evening to satisfy themselves that the “Boston Bombshell” (as she was referred to behind her back) was not about to explode in their household. And Laura fully understood that if she hoped to have company while working late, she had better reassure the wives that any nocturnal activities she would undertake with their husbands would be strictly intellectual.