Random Winds (57 page)

What was he saying? Words, cheap, smooth, easy words, meaning nothing. How was he going to “help out”? Just what, exactly, was he going to do? His head whirled with it.

A week after that the lawyer came from the company that insured Perry, that insured them all. This one was a gentleman. He wore a nice dark suit and had a nice quiet manner. He was from Harvard Law. You would like your son to grow up and be like him.

“What is it you want of me?” Martin asked for the second time in as many weeks.

“To testify on behalf of Dr. Gault. The child died of natural causes. There is no convincing proof of anything to the contrary.”

“Convincing”
Martin thought.
Semantics. All law is word-twisting. Convincing to whom?
He passed his hand over his forehead.

“I’m not cut out to be a lawyer,” he said apologetically. “I’ll confess my head’s beginning to whirl.”

“Of course. Let me get in touch with you in another few days, to go over specifics. I’m sure we can work things out with satisfaction, and dispatch this nasty business as
quickly as possible.” And with a pleasant smile and handshake, he, too, departed.

The case seemed to fill Martin’s life. He wished it would go away, wished he’d never seen Judy Wister or Perry or anyone. It was becoming uglier, with a creeping element of vengefulness. The Wisters telephoned him at his home—he ought to get an unlisted number, damn it!—to plead. The mother wept Well, he couldn’t blame her! Perry’s wife came to his office late one afternoon and walked five blocks with him toward his home, red-eyed and begging all the way. Couldn’t blame her, either.

One afternoon the hospital superintendent called him in. “There’s talk that you don’t want to work with Perry’s lawyers,” Mr. Knolls said.

Martin answered slowly, “It’s not that I don’t want to work with them. I don’t want to work with anybody. I want to be left out.”

“You can’t be. You won’t be.”

“Why?” Martin burst out. “Why can’t I mind my own business and be left alone!” The instant he had said it, he knew the lament was puerile.

Mr. Knolls didn’t even deign to answer it He said instead, “Of course, I can’t tell you what to do, and I’m not trying to tell you. I’ve known you a long time, though, and I feel free to point out a few things you may have overlooked.”

“Such as?”

“Perry’s had twenty-two years here at Fisk. A distinguished record.” “I certainly know that.”

“Unblemished. The publicity of this affair, the strain, the emotional damage can wreck a man after all those good years.”

“I know that, too.”

“Now he needs all the help he can get. Don’t condemn him. It won’t bring the child back, anyway.” Martin looked at him.

“He’s suffered enough from this already. His wife’s undergoing—”

“He told me.”

“Well, then, I’ll say no more.” Martin nodded. “I understand.”

He began hearing unpleasant things about himself. “You’re acting like a boy scout,” he was told. “The guy had one extra drink. We all agree he shouldn’t have come into the O.R. But he’s never slipped before, and hell never slip again. So what’s to be gained by crucifying him? What?”

Purpose. Abstractions. A man’s whole professional life versus a dead child who was going to die anyway.

“You’ll be a great hero to no one but yourself, Martin. Perry’s going to win the case. He’s got prestigious people to testify for him. And the O.R. nurse is sweet on him; you know the chubby blond, what’s-her-name? And that resident Maudley is scared shitless. He’ll say what he’s expected to say. So where does that leave you if you go to the other side?”

He spoke to Tom. “Awful, awful,” Tom said, sighing and shaking his great leonine head. Then he said cautiously, “It puts you in a bad position. Tough on you.”

Martin waited.

“Yes. Tough. It’s always hard to testify against another doctor, I guess because you never know when it could be you. There but for the grace of God—that business.” He paused. “Any one of us could make one slip in a lifetime, couldn’t we?”

True. And Braidburn long ago had warned not to be too quick to judge: you never knew when it might be you who’d make a fatal mistake. One mistake out of a lifetime of good service.…

At night he lay awake conducting internal dialogues while shadows flickered over the ceiling.

Tomorrow the lawyers will be calling again. I’ve told Jenny Jennings to stall them off, but that can’t go on indefinitely.

Cold, stony looks in the hospital now. I used to think it’s simple. One side or the other. Angel of truth, versus monster of corruption. Not like that at all! Generals on the battlefield
lose thousands of men through miscalculation, errors of judgment, quirks of behavior. Nothing happens to them.

You’re comparing canaries with alligators.

Not so. Death is death, whether of one or thousands.

She was going to die anyway, remember that.

But if it hadn’t been that child, that case; if it had been a benign encapsulated tumor, a meningioma, something relatively easy and Perry had not monitored, what then? Then there would truly have been disaster.

Yes, but it wasn’t an easy case. It was death-writ-large.

They won’t recover, the Wisters won’t, whether you’re for them or against them or if you take a boat to China and disappear. The biggest names in the county medical society are going to testify for Perry. So you’ll be a boy scout! You’ll lose a friend and make more enemies.

You could retrieve a lot of goodwill by agreeing to testify for him. You could. You have tremendous prestige, which is respected. Don’t underestimate it.

So the long nights passed.

After dinner the doorbell rang. Enoch came into the den where Martin was at his desk. “There’s a lady wants to see you, Dad.”

He hoped it wasn’t Perry’s wife coming again, but probably it was. And, suddenly very tired, he made a decision. He would just simply say “yes” at last. Throw in the sponge and say, “Okay, how do you want me to help?” Get it over with. It made sense, really.

Instead a young girl walked in and sat down. He didn’t recognize her.

“Delia Whitman,” she said. “I know you but you don’t know me. I’m a fourth-year student nurse.” She swallowed hard. “I’m the girl in Dr. Gault’s case.”

Oh, not more of that! “Why have you come to me?”

“Because—I don’t know. I wanted to talk to somebody, some doctor. And I thought—the things they say about you, the nurses, I mean, a person gets a reputation—” Her voice trailed off in tears and she took out a handkerchief.

“Don’t cry,” Martin said, forcing patience. “Just tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Well, it’s—This is what happened. After the operation
when the little girl died—the mother went to a room. She was crying and Miss Hannigan called me to come and help. Stay with her, you know?”

Martin nodded.

“So, then I had to go out in the hall for medicine, and this man, the uncle, was talking to Dr. Gault, and he called me over and asked me how his sister was, and I said we were getting her some medicine, and I’m awfully sorry about the little girl. And Dr. Gault started to talk. And Doctor, he was acting awfully funny. He was talking loud, not very loud, but the thing is he was just—funny. And afterward, when they were taking the mother home, the man saw me and he stopped me and said, That guy, that doctor, he’d been drinking, hadn’t he?’

“And I said, ‘I guess so.’ And he said, ‘You smelled liquor on him, didn’t you?’ and I said yes, I had, because it was the truth, I did smell it. And now, now the lawyer for Dr. Gault—he’s an awfully nice young man, but he keeps coming around and they want me to say I had only been joking, that the man had put the words in my mouth, that I had thought he was kidding.” The girl wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

Jesus, Martin thought, will this business never end?

“The thing is, I just don’t know what to do, Dr. Farrell. And I haven’t got anybody to ask. Some of the girls say one thing and some say the other. And it seems to me what they say is all according to whether they like Dr. Gault, and it seems most of them do. Or else what they tell me depends sort of on my looking out for myself and not getting the doctors offended with me. And it seems the doctors are mostly all sticking up for Dr. Gault. So I’ve come to ask you what I should do.” She finished, balling the wet handkerchief in her palm.

It surprised him that out of this confused narration, a single threat could emerge so quickly and clearly. He had no hesitation at all in replying to this troubled, honest, childish girl.

“Why,” he said softly, “you must just tell the truth, mustn’t you?”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” he repeated.

Explanations and justifications would only confuse her some more. What she had come for was plain direction, as when a child, needing to obey, asks to be told what to do. When she had thanked him, too apologetically and too effusively, she went out. Strange how easy it had been to tell
her
what she must do and so difficult to tell himself what
he
must do!

He opened the window. The night air washed over him, bathing his hot face. Then he turned on the record player where a record had been left, the
Reformation
symphony. For long minutes he stood listening, while his unfocused eyes rested on the sky over the river. The music was a shaft of light. It was a great plea and answer. And in some absolutely crazy way it seemed his father’s voice was mixed up in it.

Suddenly everything was very simple.

He went to the telephone book. A pleasant young man from Harvard Law School would live somewhere in Manhattan, on the East Side. Yes, here it was. Might as well do it now, get it over with before the morning and be able to sleep tonight. I’m very tired, he thought again. I haven’t slept well in so long. And he picked up the telephone.

“This is Dr. Farrell,” he said. “I’m sorry to disturb you at home, but I’ll be brief. I’ve made my decision. It’s a painful one. I want you to know that it is, and I should hope perhaps you might find a way to tell Dr. Gault it is. But I cannot, I simply cannot, help you. I couldn’t do it and rest.”

Martin, having changed from operating clothes to street clothes, looked in for a moment at the door of the doctors’ lounge. It reminded him of the passing glimpses he’d had of London clubs where old men napped on brown leather chairs. The walls held Piranesi etchings of broken classic columns with vines trailing over the stumps. Why did dentists and doctors always seem to go in for broken classic columns?

Young Simpson, he of the good cheer, called out, “Going back to the office so late, Martin?”

“No, waiting for my daughter. We’ve a party on the Island.”

“Enjoy yourself,” young Simpson said.

Going down on the elevator Martin felt the smile still on his mouth. It was remarkable how even the most casual proof of being liked and accepted could freshen and support a man. As for enemies, you could hardly get through life, he supposed, without garnering some. And he thought regretfully of Perry, who having won his case without Martin’s help, now ignored him whenever they chanced to pass; of others, too, whose greetings, if any, were noticeably cool.

In the lobby he waited for Claire. The rotunda was solemn, like an edifice of ancient Rome. A new bronze plaque, glossier than the rest, displayed the names of the most recent benefactors. He was standing there reading the names almost mechanically when his daughter appeared. He watched her before she saw him. Her face was set in gravity; as soon as she saw him it bloomed into a smile. Real or assumed? he wondered.

“Reads like Dun & Bradstreet, doesn’t it, Dad?”

“I don’t like this lobby,” he said. “It’s pompous. The institute will have quite a different feel.”

She patted his shoulder as if to say: I know it will be the zenith of your life. They went out into a benign spring afternoon and walked toward the parking lot.

“Up to the second story already,” Claire observed as they passed the new construction at the end of the block.

“Right on schedule. Yes, we ought to be functioning a year from this month.”

For the sake of some obscure and foolish dignity, Martin tried to keep the jubilation from his voice. Two months ago they had laid the cornerstone, a great chunk of mauve brown marble set in a row of granite. There had been a committee to select the artifacts which in some distant, unimaginable century would be uncovered; the city might be rubble and ruin by then. And as always, Martin thought of the schoolboy poem: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Anyway, Braidburn’s text had gone in, he’d seen to that. Now almost fifty years old and much outmoded, it was still worthy of honor as the great pioneer. Outmoded! Every five years a text became outdated, so fantastic was the explosion of medical knowledge, a proliferation like leafage in a rain forest!

Thinking aloud, which he often did when in Claire’s company—it pleased him that she found nothing odd in his doing so—he said, “It’s the most challenging intellectual field of all, medicine. More than any science, as far as I’m concerned, including space exploration. What’s more important than humanity? Each step, each advance whets your curiosity so you have to go on to the next. I sometimes imagine a composer must feel like that when a symphony unfolds in his head.”

And for some reason Judy Wister popped into his own head, the skinny, trustful little thing who had lain down beneath his hands. He recalled the lawyer, that well-dressed, affable young man who had told him, “You’re a man of probity, Doctor, after all.” Probity!

The suffering, he thought, you could never rid the world of it! Even on this brief walk, in these few blocks, you saw its symbols: a dirty old woman mumbling to herself; a lost,
bony mongrel foraging in a trash can; a drained young man, sallow-cheeked, climbing up out of the subway.

How we are driven! We prate of free will and of course it is a fact, but what of accident, chance meeting, timing, health, the very luck of the genetic draw? On another day, for instance, Hazel, even given what she was—and I don’t suppose either she or I really knew what she was—might not have done what she did. It was just that moment, that particular day. He could think of it now, could even talk about it, although he seldom did, without that terrible choking inside.