Dr. Bloodmoney (19 page)

“Mildred!” He was puzzled.

“You know.” The child smiled at his ignorance. “The girl that keeps coming back to Philip. And spoils his life. We listen every night. The satellite.”

“Of course.” It was Dangerfield’s reading of the Maugham book. Eerie, Doctor Stockstill thought, this parasite swelling within her body, in unchanging moisture and darkness, fed by her blood, hearing from her in some unfathomable fashion a second-hand account of a famous novel … it makes Bill Keller part of our culture. He leads his grotesque social existence, too. God knows what he makes of the story. Does he have fantasies about it, about our life? Does he
dream
about us?

Bending, Doctor Stockstill kissed the girl on her forehead. “Okay,” he said, leading her toward the door. “You can go, now. I’ll talk to your mother and father for a minute; there’re some very old genuine pre-war magazines out in the waiting room that you can read, if you’re careful with them.”

“And then we can go home and have dinner,” Edie said happily, opening the door to the waiting room. George and Bonny rose to their feet, their faces taut with anxiety.

“Come in,” Stockstill said to them. He shut the door after them. “No cancer,” he said, speaking to Bonny in particular, whom he knew so well. “It’s a growth, of course; no doubt of that. How large it may get I can’t say. But I’d say, don’t worry about it. Perhaps by the time it’s large enough to cause trouble our surgery will be advanced enough to deal with it.”

The Kellers sighed with relief; they trembled visibly.

“You could take her to the U.C. Hospital in San Francisco,” Stockstill said. “They are performing minor surgery there … but frankly, if I were you I’d let it drop.” Much better for you not to know, he realized. It would be hard on you to have to face it … especially you, Bonny. Because of the circumstances involving the conception; it would be so easy to start feeling guilt. “She’s a healthy child and enjoys life,” he said. “Leave it at that. She’s had it since birth.”

“Has she?” Bonny said. “I didn’t realize. I guess I’m not a good mother; I’m so wrapped up in community activities—”

“Doctor Stockstill,” George Keller broke in, “let me ask you this. Is Edie a—special child?”

“ ‘Special’?” Stockstill regarded him cautiously.

“I think you know what I mean.”

“You mean, is she a funny person?”

George blanched, but his intense, grim expression remained; he waited for an answer. Stockstill could see that; the man would not be put off by a few phrases.

Stockstill said, “I presume that’s what you mean. Why do you ask? Does she seem to be funny in some fashion? Does she look funny?”

“She doesn’t look funny,” Bonny said, in a flurry of concern; she held tightly onto her husband’s arm, clinging to him. “Christ, that’s obvious; she’s perfectly normal-looking. Go to hell, George. What’s the matter with you? How can you be morbid about your own child; are you bored or something, is that it?”

“There are funny people who don’t show it,” George Keller said. “After all, I see many children; I see all our children. I’ve developed an ability to tell. A hunch, which usually is proved correct. We’re required, we in the schools, as you know, to turn any funny children over to the State of California for special training. Now—”

“I’m going home,” Bonny said. She turned and walked to the door of the waiting room. “Good-bye, Doctor.”

Stockstill said, “Wait, Bonny.”

“I don’t like this conversation,” Bonny said. “It’s ill. You’re both ill. Doctor, if you intimate in any fashion that she’s funny I won’t ever speak to you again. Or you either, George. I mean it.”

After a pause, Stockstill said, “You’re wasting your words, Bonny. I am not intimating, because there’s nothing to intimate. She has a benign tumor in the abdominal cavity; that’s all.” He felt angry. He felt, in fact, the desire to confront her with the truth. She deserved it.

But, he thought, after she has felt guilt, after she’s blamed herself for going out and having an affair with some man and producing an abnormal birth, then she will turn her attention to Edie; she will hate her. She will take it out on the child. It always goes like that. The child is a reproach to the parents, in some dim fashion, for what they did back in the old days or in the first moments of the war when everyone ran his own crazy way, did his private, personal harm as he realized what was happening. Some of us killed to stay alive, some of us just fled, some of us made fools out of ourselves… Bonny went wild, no doubt; she let herself go. And she’s that same person now; she would do it again, perhaps has done it again. And she is perfectly aware of that.

Again he wondered who the father was.

Someday I am going to ask her point blank, he decided. Perhaps she doesn’t even know; it is all a blur to her, that time in our lives. Those horrible days. Or was it horrible for her? Maybe it was lovely; she could kick the traces, do what she wanted without fear because she believed, we all did,
that none of us would survive
.

Bonny made the most of it, he realized, as she always does; she makes the most out of life in every contingency. I wish I were the same … he felt envious, as he watched her move from the room toward her child. The pretty, trim woman; she was as attractive now as she had been ten years ago—the damage, the impersonal change that had descended on them and their lives, did not seem to have touched her.

The grasshopper who fiddled. That was Bonny. In the darkness of the war, with its destruction, its infinite sporting of life forms, Bonny fiddled on, scraping out her tune of joy and enthusiasm and lack of care; she could not be persuaded, even by reality, to become reasonable. The lucky ones: people like Bonny, who are stronger than the forces of change and decay. That’s what she has eluded— the forces of decay which have set in. The roof fell on us, but not on Bonny.

He remembered a cartoon in
Punch
—

Interrupting his thoughts, Bonny said, “Doctor, have you met the new teacher, Hal Barnes?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. I saw him at a distance only.”

“You’d like him. He wants to play the cello, except of course he has no cello.” She laughed merrily, her eyes dancing with pure life. “Isn’t that pathetic?”

“Very,” he agreed.’

“Isn’t that all of us?” she said. “Our cellos are gone. And what does that leave? You tell me.”

“Christ,” Stockstill said, “I don’t know; I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

Bonny, laughing, said, “Oh, you’re so earnest.”

“She says that to me, too,” George Keller said, with a faint smile. “My wife sees mankind as a race of dung beetles laboring away. Naturally, she does not include herself.”

“She shouldn’t,” Stockstill said. “I hope she never does.”

George glanced at him sourly, then shrugged.

She might change, Stockstill thought, if she understood about her daughter. That might do it. It would take something like that, some odd blow unprecedented and unanticipated. She might even kill herself; the joy, the vitality, might switch to its utter opposite.

“Kellers,” he said aloud, “introduce me to the new teacher one day soon. I’d like to meet an ex-cello player. Maybe we can make him something out of a washtub strung with baling wire. He could play it with—”

“With horsetail,” Bonny said practically. “The bow we can make; that part is easy. What we need is a big resonating chamber, to produce the low notes. I wonder if we can find an old cedar chest. That might do. It would have to be wood, certainly.”

George said, “A barrel, cut in half.”

They laughed at that; Edie Keller, joining them, laughed, too, although she had not heard what her father—or rather, Stockstill thought, her mother’s husband—had said.

“Maybe we can find something washed up on the beach,” George said. “I notice that a lot of wooden debris shows up, especially after storms. Wrecks of old Chinese ships, no doubt, from years ago.”

Cheerfully, they departed from Doctor Stockstill’s office; he stood watching them go, the little girl between them. The three of them, he thought. Or rather, the four, if the invisible but real presence within the girl was counted.

Deep in thought he shut the door.

It could be my child, he thought. But it isn’t, because seven years ago Bonny was up in West Marin here and I was at my office in Berkeley. But if I had been near her that day—

Who was up here then? he asked himself. When the bombs fell … who of us could have been with her that day? He felt a peculiar feeling toward the man, whoever he was. I wonder how he would feel, Stockstill thought, if he knew about his child … about his
children
. Maybe someday I’ll run into him. I can’t bring myself to tell Bonny, but perhaps I will tell him.

At the Foresters’ Hall, the people of West Marin sat discussing the illness of the man in the satellite. Agitated, they interrupted one another in their eagerness to speak. The reading from
Of Human Bondage
had begun, but no one in the room wanted to listen; they were all murmuring grim-faced, all of them alarmed, as June Raub was, to realize what would happen to them if the disc jockey were to die.

“He can’t really be that sick,” Cas Stone, the largest land-owner in West Marin, exclaimed. “I never told anybody this, but listen; I’ve got a really good doctor, a specialist in heart diseases, down in San Rafael. I’ll get him to a transmitter somewhere and he can tell Dangerfield what’s the matter with him. And he can cure him.”

“But he’s got no medicines up there,” old Mrs. Lully, the most ancient person in the community, said. “I heard him say once that his departed wife used them all up.”

“I’ve got quinidine,” the pharmacist spoke up. “That’s probably exactly what he needs. But there’s no way to get it up to him.”

Earl Colvig, who headed the West Marin Police, said, “I understand that the Army people at Cheyenne are going to make another try to reach him later this year.”

“Take your quinidine to Cheyenne,” Cas Stone said to the pharmacist.

“To Cheyenne?” the pharmacist quavered. “There aren’t any through roads over the Sierras any more. I’d never get there.”

In as calm a voice as possible, June Raub said, “Perhaps he isn’t actually ill; perhaps it’s only hypochondria, from being isolated and alone up there all these years. Something about the way he detailed each symptom made me suspect that.” However, hardly anyone heard her. The three representatives from Bolinas, she noticed, had gone quietly over beside the radio and were stooping down to listen to the reading. “Maybe he won’t die,” she said, half to herself.

At that, the glasses man glanced up at her. She saw on his face an expression of shock and numbness, as if the realization that the man in the satellite might be sick and would die was too much for him. The illness of his own daughter, she thought, had not affected him so.

A silence fell over the people in the furthest part of the Hall, and June Raub looked to see what had happened.

At the door, a gleaming platform of machinery had rolled into sight. Hoppy Harrington had arrived.

“Hoppy, you know what?” Cas Stone called. “Dangerfield said he’s got something wrong with him, maybe his heart.”

They all became silent, waiting for the phocomelus to speak.

Hoppy rolled past them and up to the radio; he halted his ’mobile, sent one of his manual extensions over to delicately diddle at the tuning knob. The three representatives from Bolinas respectfully stood aside. Static rose, then faded, and the voice of Walt Dangerfield came in clear and strong. The reading was still in progress, and Hoppy, in the center of his machinery, listened intently. He, and the others in the room, continued to listen without speaking until at last the sound faded out as the satellite passed beyond the range of reception. Then, once again, there was only the static.

All of a sudden, in a voice exactly like Dangerfield’s, the phocomelus said, “Well, my dear friends, what’ll we have next to entertain us?”

This time the imitation was so perfect that several people in the room gasped. Others clapped, and Hoppy smiled. “How about some more of that juggling?” the pharmacist called. “I like that.”

“ ‘Juggling,’ ” the phocomelus said, this time exactly in the pharmacist’s quavering, prissy voice. “ ‘I like that.’ ”

“No,” Cas Stone said, “I want to hear him do Dangerfield; do some more of that, Hoppy. Come on.”

The phocomelus spun his ’mobile around so that he faced the audience. “Hoode hoode hoo,” he chuckled in the low, easy-going tones which they all knew so well. June Raub caught her breath; it was eerie, the phoce’s ability to mimic. It always disconcerted her … if she shut her eyes she could imagine that it actually was Dangerfield still talking, still in contact with them. She did so, deliberately pretending to herself. He’s not sick, he’s not dying, she told herself; listen to him. As if in answer to her own thoughts, the friendly voice was murmuring, “I’ve got a little pain here in my chest, but it doesn’t amount to a thing; don’t worry about it, friends. Upset stomach, most likely. Over-indulgence. And what do we take for that? Does anybody out there remember?”

A man in the audience shouted, “I remember: alkalize with Alka Seltzer!”

“Hoode hoode hoo,” the warm voice chuckled. “That’s right. Good for you. Now let me give you a tip on how to store gladiola bulbs all through the winter without fear of annoying pests. Simply wrap them in aluminum foil.”