Establishment (24 page)

“Do you agree with him, Harvey?” Barbara asked.

“Yes, I think I do. I think Boyd tends to leap to conclusions. I am not at all sure that this will ever come to trial, but if it does, we should have distinguished counsel to act in court.”

“Do you have anyone in mind?”

“I was thinking of Judge James Fredericks. He's your father's friend. He retired after a very distinguished career on the bench.”

“And he's damned impressive,” Kimmelman added.

***

When Sally Lavette's baby, May Ling, reached the age of thirteen months, Joe convinced her to halt breast feeding and to start the child on regular milk. Sally agreed reluctantly, feeling that for the first time in her life her breast development was adequate in terms of what every American girl should have. She had read somewhere that removing a child from the breast would reduce said organ to a size even smaller than the original. Joe convinced her that this was quite unscientific, but the process of convincing led to a bitter and one-sided argument.

Such arguments had become increasingly frequent. They were one-sided because Joe would not fight back verbally, would not lose his temper, and thereby would not give Sally an opportunity to scratch at the roots of what was bothering her. It was an odd match in any case. At the age of thirteen, when Joe, nine years older, was working at Higate Winery during the summer, Sally specified that if he ever married anyone else, she would kill him. She was an unusually bright, unusually romantic little girl. As much as a woman may create a man, she created Joe—only the creation never matched the reality.

Joseph Lavette was serious, sober, and unimaginative, which is not to say that he lacked intelligence. In medical school, he had been among the top five in his class. In the hospital where he operated, he already had a reputation for skill and probity. In the Pacific theater, he had crammed a lifetime of experience into three years of front-line surgery, but in exchange he had given away his boyhood, his fancies, his romantic images, and practically all of his illusions. He did not possess his sister Barbara's joyous optimism, her deep, unshakable appreciation of simply being alive; when he returned from the Pacific, the only thing that remained to cling to was Sally Levy. It was not unreasonable that a young man who was half Chinese and half Italian, dark, and given to brooding should be enamored of Sally. She was as lighthearted, long-limbed, and elastic as a young fawn. She was a natural golden blonde, in spite of her constant reference to her long, straight hair as being straw-colored. She had never been pretty—she had her mother's large bones and wide shoulders—but at a point in her maturity she became suddenly quite beautiful, her pale blue eyes deepset under straight brows, her high cheekbones framing a face that was exciting and different. She existed with one foot in the world and one foot out of it. Her imagination was wild and unrestrained, and with the publication of her first book of poems,
Songs of Napa
, she was very warmly recognized if not enriched.

Joe accepted her only partially for what she was. He did not want her to be different, yet he did not want her the way she was. Instead of coming out of his war experience as a cynic, or as a brutalized, self-satisfied medical thug, or as a heartless, success-oriented surgeon, or even as a reasonably compassionate physician, he emerged as a sort of selfless saint who had taken a vow of poverty. In the beginning, Sally had been impressed and filled with admiration; in due time, the admiration became tinged with frustration and eventually with irritation—which was compounded by her inability to press him to a confrontation. Anger on his part might have cleared the air. He never permitted himself real anger.

Sally had taken no vow of poverty. She disliked the clinic, she disliked working there, and she disliked Boyle Heights. She was not insensitive to the poverty and misery of the people who lived there; she simply felt that she had the right to her own existence. At first she attempted to make herself a part of Joe's life at the clinic. She worked at the admissions desk. She cleaned rooms. She boiled instruments. She consoled mothers with sick children and put her own child aside to comfort the sick and battered children who were brought there. But all of this was motivated by a romantic view of Joe's work, and when the romance washed out, as it of necessity had to, the work turned into pointless drudgery.

There was one night in particular that she would never forget. She was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, helping Joe at the clinic. It was one of those nights of torrential tropical rain that come during the Los Angeles winter, blinding sheets of rain, and a few minutes before midnight, three Chicano boys, one of them sixteen years old, two of them seventeen, were brought into the clinic by friends. They had been in a gang fight and had been badly hurt. Frank Gonzales had already gone home, and only Sally and Joe were at the clinic.

Joe told her to telephone for an ambulance, which she did. Not until the next day did she learn that the ambulance had crashed head-on into a truck. Meanwhile, Joe took the three boys into his examining room. The other boys vanished—understandably, since there would certainly be a police investigation. Sally finished telephoning and heard Joe calling for her. She ran into the examining room, cried out in horror, and pressed her hands over her mouth to keep from being sick. There were two examining tables holding two of the boys, both covered with blood. The third boy lay on the floor, the handle of an ice pick sticking out of his chest, the ice pick quivering and moving with his breath. His eyes were open, and he was pleading in Spanish, “Help me, please. I am going to die.”

Sally turned toward the door, and Joe's voice hit her like a whiplash. “Stay here! I need you! I can't handle this alone!”

“I can't.”

“You damn well can and you will!”

The following day, Sally read Joe's notes on what had happened. “Fortez, knife wound, entrance subcostal on the left side, hand's breadth from umbilicus. Deep and not clean. Debris on inner aspects, 1½ inches in length. Immediate question: puncture of spleen. Aguila, gunshot. Clean hole located on chest wall approx. at 2nd interspace on right-hand side. No exit wound. Conscious. Complaint of pain in right axilla—with paresphesias of fingers and hand of right arm. Should have X-rayed, but no way. Luck. Bullet in axilla close to brachial plexus. Decent vital signs. No name for third. Ice pick in heart, conscious. Puncture wound parasternal on left side at third intercostal space.” That was the following day. Now Joe pleaded with her, “I need you, Sally.”

“I can't do this. You know that.”

“Hand me that scissors. Did you call the ambulance?”

“Christ, I'm in my sixth month.”

“Hand me the damn scissors!” he yelled at her. “And that kid on the floor. I don't want him to move. Talk to him,” he said as he took the scissors from her. “Did you call the ambulance?”

“Yes.”

“Well, talk to him. Get down there and talk to him. Tell him to lie still, not to move. Go on, your Spanish is better than mine.”

She knelt by the boy with the ice pick sticking out of his chest. She felt that she was going to faint, and afterward she had nightmares about that moving, bobbing ice pick that went up and down with the boy's heartbeat. While Joe cut away the clothes of the boy with the knife wound, she knelt on the floor, whispering in Spanish, tongue-tied at first and saying “
Lo compadezco
” inanely, and then, “Please. Lie still. You will be all right.”

His hand went to the ice pick, and Joe snapped, “No! He mustn't touch it! Make him understand that! He dies if he pulls out that ice pick! Make him understand that!”

“Why can't you help him?”

“Because I have a kid here with a punctured spleen, and he's going to die if I don't remove it. Anyway, I can't do anything about that one. If the ice pick's in his heart, and it probably is, I need a heart-lung machine. God damn it, I need a hospital. Where the hell is that ambulance?”

She told the boy, “Please, please, you must lie still and don't touch that thing in your chest. You'll be all right, but only if you lie still.”

He was crying and he clung to her hand.

“Call Frank,” Joe said suddenly. “Tell him to get his ass over here.” His voice softened. “And then come back, baby. Please. I need help.”

She fled from the room and telephoned Joe's partner. Frank was asleep. “There are three men dying here!” she shouted. “Please get over here!” Then she went into the bathroom and threw up. She stood at the toilet for a few moments, hugging her swollen belly, trying to stop shaking, trying to halt the convulsive heaving of her stomach. Then she went back into Joe's office and called the hospital again. The ambulance, they told her, was on its way. She called the police.

Then she forced herself back into the examining room. “Frank will be here in ten minutes,” she said almost primly. “I called the cops.”

“How do you feel?”

“I think I'm all right.”

“This one can't wait. His spleen is punctured, and if I don't get it out, he'll die. As soon as Frank comes, we'll operate. You know how the sterilizer works. Frank will do the anesthesia, but we need your help, Sally.”

She helped. No ambulance came until it was too late. The boy on the floor with the ice pick in his chest died. Sally got through the next two hours without fainting or being sick again, but the horror of that night remained with her. She had no feeling of achievement, of succoring human suffering. Intellectually, she could create such an attitude within herself, but it always crumbled. She felt no triumph at the miracle of two successful operations conducted in the limited facilities of the examining room. She could not share that with Joe. She could only recoil in horror at the waste of the senseless gang fights and at the misery that poured into the clinic.

“You and me,” she said to Joe, “we are different people, different bodies.”

“I understand that.”

“No, you don't. You don't understand it at all. You only see me as your wife.”

“Well, you are my wife,” he said placatingly.

“I am not your anything. You don't own me.”

“Have I ever said that I own you?”

“Yes, in a hundred different ways, and the main way is that whatever you do is of great importance and whatever I do is silly nonsense.”

“I don't look at it that way at all,” Joe protested.

“Of course you say you don't. If you could see it the way I see it, it wouldn't happen. But you just look at me with that damned superior, condescending manner of yours, and you don't even respect me enough to blow your top at me!”

“Would it indicate that I respected you if I lost my temper and called you names?”

“I think it would, yes! At least I would be here. I would know that I existed.”

“Sally,” Joe begged her, “I admit that I get lost in my work. It's not only that I love my work. It's also a part of me. It's the reason I exist. I know there's too much of it, but what can I do? Frank Gonzales works just as hard as I do, and his wife doesn't complain.”

“Of course not. She's a Chicano.”

“Oh, great! I never expected that from you.”

“All I mean is that Chicano women have every shred of independence kicked out of them. I'm not being anti-Mexican when I say that they kick the life out of their women. Oh, I give up! What's the use?”

A few days after that specific argument, Billy Clawson telephoned and asked Sally whether he could drop by the house and see her. Since his first visit to the clinic, he had been working there without pay and living in a furnished room on Boyle Heights. Sally was not sure she liked him, but neither could she bring herself to dislike him. She told herself once that he and Joe were the two polarized ends of what she thought of as the Jesus Christ complex.
Joseph
, she said to herself,
is a strong, assertive, pain-in-the-ass saint. Billy is a gentle, obsequious, pain-in-the-ass saint. They are a fine pair. Though obsequious
, she added to herself,
was perhaps not the precise word.
Billy was gentle, bewildered, always giving the impression of having stepped into life accidentally. Thirty years old, he had the diffidence of a young man ten years his junior; like his sister, Eloise, he appeared always to be saddled with a conviction of his own worthlessness.

When he arrived at the house on Silver Lake, Sally was tucking May Ling into a carriage. “We're going for a walk,” she said to Billy. “Why don't you come along.”

He wore the same turtleneck sweater that she had seen weeks before, the same kind of shapeless corduroy trousers and heavy work shoes.

“Oh, fine. Surely. A walk would be nice.”

He ambled along beside her in silence until she began to wonder whether this was the reason for his visit, silence. She said the weather was nice and that May Ling was healthy. “But what can I do for you, Billy?”

“Well, nothing for me exactly. But I have felt so guilty about Barbara.”

“About Barbara? But why?”

“Well, you know, she has gone through a bit of hell, losing her husband and having that rotten experience with that committee in Washington. Well—well, you know, she is an Episcopalian, and here I am an Episcopalian priest, and we are friends—well, not close but friends—and I was wondering whether you thought it might comfort her if I went up there to San Francisco and spoke to her?”

“Barbara?”

“Oh, yes, Barbara.”

Sally stopped wheeling the carriage and turned to face him. “Billy,” she said, “you're a very nice man and very kind. But no, I don't think it would be a good idea. I think the last thing in the world Barbara needs at this moment is to be comforted by a minister.”

“I'm glad you said that,” he admitted. “I'm not much good at comforting.”