Random Winds (27 page)

“Well, of course, you must know that people—that nurses—talk about doctors, especially about the young, unmarried ones.” She flushed. “But they say good things about you! That you’re awfully gentle with your patients and really care, that even when you’re cranky with the nurses sometimes, you’re sorry afterward. They all like you.”

“That’s not what you meant before, when we were talking about divorce.”

She said timidly, “They think you must be a chaser because you’re not married. But I didn’t think you were.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I felt a quietness in you. And maybe some sadness.”

It isn’t sensible to talk about your private life, especially where your work is: a snobbish concept, maybe, but of proven practicality all the same. And even as he was thinking so, Martin began to speak.

It was almost as though someone else were talking and he were listening. Slowly and thoughtfully, he heard himself say aloud the names of people and places which he had scarcely used since they had passed out of his life. Menton. Mary. Jessie. Lamb House. Claire.

The night wind blew hard there on the fourteenth floor, so that Hazel drew the sweater closer. Her eyes never left his face.

“That’s the whole story?” she asked when he had finished.

“The whole story.”

“And it’s over between Mary and you?”

“Yes,” he said harshly.

He was angry with himself. Why had he spilled everything out to a stranger? All day he had been feeling a foggy sadness, and now, having been on his feet almost twenty-four hours, he had simply been carried away by fatigue. Damn, he ought to have gone home to sleep instead of sitting here pouring his heart out! He stood up. It was five o’clock. A milky light had risen at the windows.

“I’d better get home to shave and change before I go to work. By the way, when do you go back on duty?”

“At seven tonight.”

“Then this was your time to sleep, and I’ve kept you up.”

“I wouldn’t have stayed if I hadn’t wanted to.” She touched his arm. “I just thought—you’re probably sorry you told me so much. You’re worried I’ll talk about it all over the place. But I never will. You can trust me.”

He looked down into a face so gentle that it pained him: it was like looking at a wound. One saw such faces on lonesome children, on certain rare old men and sometimes on women of radiant goodness.

“Yes,” he said, “I trust you.”

Eastman moved back from the respirator, stepping carefully between the oxygen tank and the tubing. In the transparent box which had been trundled over the bed, Vicky Moser lay unmoving, except for the slight rise and fall of her chest. He beckoned to Martin and they went out to the corridor.

“For the sake of my blood pressure, I had to wait a whole day before I could talk to you, Farrell,” he began.

“I don’t understand!”

“You had no right to take the knife to Vicky Moser!” Eastman’s words were precisely separated, cut apart, as if he were teaching English to a foreigner. “You had no authority. What made you think you had?”

Martin was dumbfounded. “But you were out of town! And I
am
your associate!”

“You made no real effort to reach me. As a matter of fact, I had gone to my sister’s house in Westchester before starting for Maine in the morning. I could have been back here in little more than an hour.”

“How, in all fairness, could I have known that?”

“Well, in all fairness, perhaps you couldn’t. Certainly, though, you could have called some other chief, couldn’t you?”

“Dr. Florio and Dr. Samson were called and couldn’t be reached.”

“What about Shirer, then? These are prominent people, Farrell. Moser’s a trustee. You don’t fool around with people like Moser. I shouldn’t have to tell you that, for God’s sake.”

Anger began to boil up in Martin, but he answered coolly. “In the first place, sir, I don’t care a damn about prominence. In the second place, I didn’t recommend Dr. Shirer because I consider myself a better surgeon than he is.”

“What? Shirer has been on staff here for thirty years! And you compare yourself with him?”

“He’s been doing mediocre work for thirty years, Dr. Eastman.”

“Oh, I suppose you consider my work mediocre, too?”

“Of course I don’t. But there are some procedures I
can
do as well as you can, and this was one of them.”

“It was, was it?”

“Yes, I knew I could do it. I wouldn’t have undertaken it otherwise.”

“I call that arrogant. I don’t know what you call it.”

“I call it confident.”

Eastman’s cheeks reddened. “I’ll want to talk about that again, Farrell. I’m not sure you and I can get along in the future unless certain things are clarified.”

In Martin the anger now boiled over. He had done a thorough job! If it didn’t work out, if the girl should die or should live and merely vegetate, why then, it would have happened anyway! It would have been “fated,” “ordained,” whatever that meant. I truly and honestly know my limitations, he thought.

And he said, with a calmness that surprised himself, “I don’t think we will get along, Dr. Eastman, unless you give me the respect and freedom I deserve.”

For a second Eastman stared at him; then, without replying, he turned about and almost ran down the hall.

For three days they poured glucose and oxygen into Vicky Moser. She was now Eastman’s patient; Martin had been removed from the case. He wondered what was being whispered about the hospital. No doubt the news had filtered down to the newest student nurse on the floor. Nevertheless, he went in to look at Vicky. Hazel Janos was there one evening, but she made no comment, only watched while Martin pulled Vicky’s eyelids back and found no change. The pupils were still enlarged and made no move under the pinpoint shaft of his pencil-light.

On the fourth day came momentary hope when normal breathing resumed, and she was taken out of the respirator.
But still she lay inert, unresponsive to touch or light or the sound of voices.

Once, in the elevator, Martin saw her parents, two people grown abruptly small and old. The mother huddled and shivered, although July blazed outside. When they saw Martin, they turned away and he understood that they were holding him responsible and would always hold him so.

At the office he continued to hold regular hours. Eastman did not come in. Obviously, he had interrupted his vacation only for the Moser girl. It seemed to Martin that the secretaries looked at him with curiosity and compassion. Probably they had been told he wouldn’t be with them much longer.

And for Vicky Moser the days rolled slowly through their routines: feeding tubes, spinal taps, antibiotics, anticonvulsive. If she lives, Martin thought, she may not be able to talk. She may not be able to move. Or she may be able to talk only nonsense and move with the violence of an animal. Even though officially the girl was not his patient, in his mind she was so still. With him she had entered the desert, so to speak, and he must see her out of it.

Whatever happened, they would say it was his fault Eastman would see to that, had seen to it already. And it wouldn’t be his fault.
Still, what if it were?

He began to pray: O God, don’t let her die; she’s only eighteen. Strange that he should pray! He had had no interest in religion for years, being neither for it nor against it. He wondered whether his beseeching was not perhaps some sort of theatricality, watching himself at humble prayer in a fine old tradition, without believing a word of it. And then he remembered his father’s rounded cadence in the moldy green parlor before winter breakfasts and he felt like crying.

O God, don’t let her die!

At the hospital, late one afternoon as he was about to go into Vicky’s room, Martin met Eastman coming out.

“Anything you want?” Eastman asked bluntly.

“Just to know how the patient is doing.”

“My patient,” Eastman said, “is doing badly. I plan to operate again in the morning.”

Martin was appalled. “Operate again? But why?”

“Self-evident,
I
should say.”

“I would guess there’s hemorrhaging, which ought to subside. If you ask me, we should give it some more time.”

“I’m not asking you. I’m of the opinion that there are splinters in there, and I’m going back for them.”

“Doctor,” Martin said earnestly, “let’s put personal feelings aside for a minute.
I
give you my word there are none.
I
removed them all.”

“Damn it! You couldn’t have!”

No stranger would have believed that this man could ever be genial. His eyes were hostile; his lips folded inward, making a gash across the chin.

“I’m having X-rays in the morning, naturally, but I can tell you right here and now what they will show.”

He swung around. His shoes slapped the floor smartly all the way to the elevator.

When Martin went into the room he saw at once that there had been no change. The very air felt cold, as if some chill were issuing from that poor body, as in a crypt where the dead have lain for centuries. He stood a moment, shuddered, and went downstairs again, out to the searing street Here were the smells of life—gasoline and dog droppings and a sugary whiff from the open door of a bakery.

Why had she not revived? There were no splinters, he knew there weren’t.
Still, suppose there were?
Eastman was going to operate again, and she wouldn’t be able to take the shock. If she died—

He thought of the times he had been present when a family received the news of death. A husband, a mother or a child dies; some people can accept such loss in wordless despair; others scream, protest that it can’t be true. It was the mast terrible errand a doctor ever had to carry out, and one never would, never could, get used to it.

That night Martin scarcely slept. At five o’clock he got up and walked through echoing streets to the hospital. He half hoped Hazel Janos would be there, then recalled that she went off duty at midnight. A bulky, middle-aged
woman in white was dozing upright in the chair beside the bed.

“Is there any change?” he whispered, and the woman answered, “None.”

Gently, Martin raised one eyelid, then the other, and turned his flashlight on. There was no contraction of the pupils. He sighed.

Then he lifted the blanket, reached for a limp arm and stroked it Was there, or did he imagine a very, very faint withdrawal of the flesh, a reaction to his touch? He felt a swift rise of expectation and as quickly stifled it He pressed harder. Was there a movement, the merest fraction of movement?

“Did you see that, Nurse?”

She turned up the light and leaned over the bed.

“Here. I’ll show you.”

Again Martin pressed the arm, and now he was sure he saw a slight withdrawal.

“Did you see it? Did you?

“Yes. Yes, I think I did. Oh, Doctor, do you think possibly—”

And the two of them, the aging woman and the young man, stared at each other across the bed.

“I don’t dare hope,” Martin said. It may mean nothing at all, he told himself, only a reflex, a flicker in a dead brain. It probably does mean nothing. Yet he hoped.

At seven the shifts changed and a new nurse came. He heard the two women whispering in the corridor outside the room as he stood watching by the bed. Still the girl lay, the marble effigy on the tomb. At eight o’clock orderlies arrived to wheel her below for X-rays.

“I hear they’re going to operate again,” the nurse remarked with curiosity. She had a handsome, cold face. Martin didn’t answer. Hazel Janos would
care
, he thought suddenly.

At eight-fifteen Mr. Moser entered the room, stopped when he saw Martin and frowned. “I thought you were off the case.”

“I am. This is purely unofficial. I’m humanly concerned to see how my work turned out.”

Mr. Moser sat down next to the nurse. They spoke in such low tones that Martin couldn’t hear, but he wasn’t supposed to hear. He was to be excluded.

At the window he looked down to aimless scurry and hurry on the street below. From this height human beings were no more than water beetles on a pond. Awesome to think how in each one, that man lifting the trash can, that one inching his car into a parking space, raged a private, daily struggle with the universe!

When Dr. Eastman came in, Martin did not turn around.

“We shall have to operate,” he heard Eastman say in his quiet voice of authority. “There’s undoubtedly a splinter in there, maybe more than one. We’ll know, of course, as soon as the X-rays come up.”

In the room there was total silence. Martin, still standing at the window, felt eyes on his back. At eight-fifty a technician came in with the X-rays.

“Thank you, Mr. Poole,” Eastman said formally.

Now Martin turned around as Eastman held the X-rays to the light. The brain was a gray-and-white intaglio on the plate. Spare, Martin thought, like modern art. For a long minute or two Eastman studied it while Mr. Moser, puzzled and afraid, peered over his shoulder.

At last Moser spoke. “Well, Doctor?”

Eastman pursed his lips. “Perplexing. Perplexing.”

“What is?”

“There’s nothing. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Well, no splinters—that I can see.”

A strange sound, part laugh, part sob, forced itself from Martin’s throat. It was almost inaudible, but Eastman heard it. He looked over and then quickly away.

So I was right, Martin thought. But still, still there could be infection, couldn’t there? We were absolutely sterile, and yet one never knows.

When the door opened and the patient was brought back, the little group reformed around the bed. Eastman was silent. The others waited for him to say something.

And Moser said softly, “My wife is falling apart.”

Eastman nodded. “I know.”

“What do you suggest now, Doctor?”

“I’ve been thinking—another set of X-rays. There’s got to be something there. I’m still convinced. The ventricles aren’t enlarged, the—”

“Look at this,” Martin said.

“At what?” Eastman said coldly.

Martin turned the flashlight on. “The pupil. She reacts. And this morning I thought I saw—”