Random Winds (7 page)

Uncle Drew took me aside. He was the only one who felt sorry for me. I stood between his knees while he sat on the sofa, his hands on my shoulders.

“You haven’t hurt her, Fern. Everyone’s excited, but you haven’t hurt her, Fern. Remember that. It’s only a bump and will go away in a day or two.”

I didn’t want to go away to school. I had friends here. And I didn’t want to leave my dogs! But Jessie had no friends. A small, private school would be better for her, they said.

Mother said, “We can’t send Jessie away to school and keep you here, can we?”

And Father said, “You will meet nicer girls in boarding school, anyway.”

But the girls all came from New York or Boston or Montreal. It was the same as having no friends at all.

Now she doesn’t want to go to Europe this winter. If she doesn’t go, Father will want me to stay home, too. But I’m going. No matter what, I’m going.

I shall be sorry to leave Martin. I might fall in love with him if I could know him a little longer. And still in a way it seems I’ve always known him. Even his silence speaks to me. Is it possible that he loves me already? But he’s going away tomorrow … But he will come back. It’s only a few months, after all. Maybe, then … And I shall see Europe … all the sparkle … I’ve never been anywhere at all.

I think Jessie has fallen in love with him, though. I’m sorry if she has. I hope she hasn’t. Life is very, very harsh …

“It will be such joy having you with us, Fern,” Aunt Milly was saying and then, addressing Martin, “We’ve invited Fern and Jessie to go to Europe with us, did you know? We shall leave just after Labor Day and spend the winter. I do wish, Jessie, you would change your mind and come along, too.”

Jessie shook her head.

“It would do you the world of good, you know. Take you out of yourself. You really do need—”

“I really do need a new spine,” Jessie said, and laughed.

Aunt Milly blushed. “Oh, Jessie, I only meant—”

“I know what you meant, Aunt Milly. You meant well.”

“Nice is wonderful in the winter, very mild,” Uncle Drew observed. “You can always change your mind, Jessie. Up to the last minute.”

The voices crossed the table in a neat little fugue.

Aunt Milly said to Fern, “You’ll be seeing the great art of the world. It’ll help immensely in your career, you know.”

“Career!” The father was irritated. “Don’t, please, give her more grandiose ideas than she already has. It’s a pretty hobby and that’s all it is.”

“Excuse me, but you’re hardly a Judge,” Mary said.

“And you think you can judge?”

“No, but there are other people in this world who can.”

“Was that thunder I heard, by any chance?” Uncle Drew asked, changing the subject.

Martin smiled at him, receiving a knowing, answering smile. A kindly soul! Worlds removed from the heavy-handed petty tyrant at the head of the table!

“Mary, let’s go for a walk,” he proposed when they had left the table. “And Jessie come, too.”

“I don’t want to,” Jessie said.

Mr. Meig frowned. “It’s going to rain any minute.”

“Rain won’t hurt anyone,” Aunt Milly told him.

“We’ll not go far,” Martin said.

The town was closed for the night. Houses wore shut faces; their windows were drooping eyelids. A horn blew somewhere, a forlorn, far call in the silence. They circled through dwindling streets from pavement to asphalt to dirt, and where the fields began, turned back, talking of this and that and of nothing in particular.

“So you’ll be going away,” Martin said. “I’ll miss you, Mary.”

The words were unforgivably banal. He wanted to say such beautiful, extravagant things: I’m enchanted, I think of you all day. Why was he so awkward, so tongue-tied?
Was it the family, the gloomy house, the gloomy father? Perhaps, in another setting more private and free, or if he were a few years farther along and had something definite to give—

The smell of rain was in the air when they came to the gate. Eastward, the clouds were darkening with approaching storm, but in the west the afterglow still streaked the sky in lines of copper and rose and a yellow like the inside of a peach.

“Oh look!” Mary cried. “It sparkles! Martin, look!”

But he was not looking at the sky. He was looking at her, standing there with her hand held to her throat and the wonder on her face. There was a pain in his heart that he couldn’t have believed possible.

At the front door they stood cramped between overgrown laurels. And quite suddenly the rain came, spattering on the leaves.

“Well,” he said. “I guess I’d better start.”

“I’ll think of you. We all will.”

He had meant only to kiss her good-bye. But when he had caught her to him, he was unable to let her go. How long he would have held her there he didn’t know, but someone stirred in the vestibule as if to open the door. So she turned quickly into the house and he went clattering down the steps into the rain.

This was the way of it: He was Dr. Farrell, intern, responsible for lives. Agitated relatives waylaid him and the squawk-box pursued him. His irrevocable signature went on every record. Pray it wasn’t written as witness to a mistake he’d made! Best not to think about that, though; just step forward and begin, the way a child learns to walk.

The emergency room stayed in motion all night. One lived on black coffee. He slept on a cot or dozed off, rather, for a few minutes until a nurse came to shake him awake again. The doors would swing open, and another stretcher come rolling through. On the wards, the ominous nights were filled with sighs. Unbearable pain was unbearable to watch. He dreaded the terminal cancer patient most of all; the breakdown of personality in even the most stalwart was terrible. He had not known that desperate people, even the very old, call out for their mothers.

At times he thought he felt the weight of the pain-filled building, ten stories high, lying on his shoulders.

“What’s different about you?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know. What is?”

“You’re only half here. Is there some trouble with your father or something?” Martin had often said his father worked too hard and his blood pressure was too high.

“No, no, I’m just a little tense, I guess.”

There was no one in the world whom he could trust more than this friend who was searching him now with inquiring eyes, but he couldn’t, he didn’t want to, talk about Mary.

If only his mind were clear again as once it had been! If only the work were all he had to think about! But he trembled inwardly: trembled at seeing the name of the Meig
plant in the weekly paper, forwarded from home; trembled at seeing a patient named Fern, a fat woman with a brogue and abscessed tonsils.

He trembled when the mail came. She sent a card from Lake Champlain:
Visiting here for a few days. Love
. He read it over and over, studying the shape of the words. She wrote in backhand. He wondered what that meant, whether it said anything about her personality. Then a card came that had a picture of an ocean liner. It had been mailed from Cherbourg. He imagined her walking in the rain on a cobbled street. He ached for her. It was a definite physical ache in the chest. One could understand why the ancients had believed that the heart was the seat of the emotions.

His own emotions came close to the surface. He broke off with Harriet, in a scene that he had wanted to keep gentle but that she made angry. His desire for her, for anyone but Mary, had drained away, as if a sluice had been opened.

A tragedy took place in the hospital when one of the nurses killed herself. She had been going with Dan Ritchie, resident in orthopedics; he had promised to marry her, then changed his mind. The horror of this shook Martin deeply. How the suffering must have cut to make a human being want to die! But he thought he could understand it. He felt that he had grown enormously in understanding.

And he was thankful for being overworked. It was the only way he would get through the winter.

What he saw first on the stretcher was a young girl in a tight pink sweater and skirt. It crossed his mind that she looked like a girl who would be named “Donna” or “Dawn.” And on a necklace of cheap beads her name was spelled out: Donna. She had been run over in the rain. Her face was gashed and her arms, which she must have flung out to save herself, had been crushed.

Standard procedure, he thought, accustomed as he was by now to quick judgment and quick action. Neurosurgery later to save the ulnar nerves. Useless hands, otherwise.
Patch the face while waiting. Sedation, of course. Local anaesthesia. He called out orders. Black silk. Fine needle.

“This won’t hurt,” he said.

Never did this before. Where to find a surgeon Saturday night? Common sense. Trick is: very, very small stitches. Careful. Careful. Suture. Tie. Knot. Cut. Again. Suture. Tie. Knot. Cut.

When he was finished, the pathetic face was crisscrossed with black silk and he was sweating. He leaned down.

“Donna? I’m all through.”

She was, mercifully, half asleep. “Will my face be all right?”

“Yes,” he said confidently.

The mouth, large and cherry-colored, quivered. “Do you promise I won’t be scarred?”

“I promise.”

“Will I be a cripple, Doctor?”

“Of course not,” he said. And forgive me for the lie because I really don’t know.

They had cut the pink sweater off. Somebody began to cut the necklace.

“No,” Martin said. “Don’t do that.” And he pulled the clasp toward the front to unfasten the beads. They would be precious to Donna.

After she had been wheeled upstairs he kept thinking of her, and the next morning was still thinking of her. Mentally, as was his habit, he constructed her life. She lived in a walk-up and worked in the five-and-ten. For lunch she ate a tuna fish sandwich and a chocolate soda. She stood in line at the funerals of movie stars, chewing gum in wads. He felt an indescribable sadness. Some patients did that to him. What would become of her with paralyzed hands?

Dr. Albeniz was to operate in the forenoon. Martin arrived when it was all over and the doctors were back in the locker room.

“It was very close,” Albeniz said, replying to Martin’s question. “But I’m fairly sure she’ll be all right.” He seemed surprised. “Why, do you know the girl?”

“No. I was on duty when she came in. I sutured her face.”

“You did?” There was strong emphasis on the “you.”

Martin felt quick dread in the pit of the stomach.

“I’m afraid I’m the culprit.”

“Culprit?” Albeniz, who was tying his shoes, glanced up.

“On the contrary, I asked because it’s a superb job. By the looks of it she will have scarcely a scar.”

Martin swallowed, disbelieving. “I guess I was just lucky then.”

“You had your nerve, knowing nothing about it!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have good hands. Are you interested in plastic surgery?”

“Not particularly.” He corrected himself, “No, I’m not.”

“Well, it was a superb job,” Albeniz repeated.

Martin flushed, both with pleasure and misgiving. What had he dared to do, knowing so little? He had just been awfully lucky! Very generous, though, of Albeniz to say what he had.

A week or two later, Albeniz ran past him in a corridor. Speed was his eccentricity. It seemed that all the greats had some eccentricity or other! Jeffers wore rubbers even when the sun was shining. Albeniz never took the elevator, preferring in his haste to run up three flights of stairs. When he saw Martin he stopped.

“Would you like to know how your patient is getting on?”

“Oh, yes,” Martin said, pleased at being treated like a colleague.

“Well, for a while I had my doubts, but she will definitely have usable hands. Also a presentable face, thanks to you.”

It seemed necessary to say something polite in return. “After what you’ve done for her, my suturing seems unimportant.”

“Not so. It’s not very good for one’s mental health to have scarred cheeks, you know.”

“But your work is vital. I’ve seen you work and I’ve been—I guess you could say I’ve been thrilled each time.”

Albeniz smiled. “Well then, I give you a standing invitation to come and watch whenever you’re free.”

*  *  *

The operating room was fitted out in porcelain and stainless steel, gleaming silver-gray. Beyond the great window, the winter sky was a darker gray. Albeniz and his resident, the anaesthesiologist, the nurses, the assistants and the subassistants moved quickly in an ordered pattern, their feet making no sound. It was a subaqueous ballet, a serious dance around the table on which the patient lay, his shaven head firmly clamped. The green curtain hanging on its frame separated his head from the rest of his body. A profusion of tubes was connected to various parts of that body; to someone who didn’t understand them it appeared to be only a tangle of tubes. But they were the weapons of this little army which was fighting for the life of the man on the table.

The excitement was unlike anything Martin had ever felt before. He stood with the explorers, with Balboa sighting the Pacific Ocean and Magellan rounding the world.

Bare and exposed lay a human brain. Albeniz looked up from it to the X-ray, hanging directly in his line of vision. There the arteries turned and curved like grapevines or Virginia creeper. There lay the dark blot and clump of tumor. Martin’s heart pounded. He tried to remember what he had learned about the brain; neurons, axons, dendrites—and could only think: There somewhere in that roughly corrugated mass, that lump made of the same stuff as stomach or liver, ran the electricity of thought. Out of it came words, music and commands to clench a fist or kiss beloved lips.

“Clamp,” said Albeniz.

His hands in their pale gloves moved inside the patient’s brain, moved among those billions of neurons.

“Cautery,” he said. “Suction.”

Five and a half hours later it was over. Albeniz looked up. His eyes, above the mask, were weary.

“I think I got it all out.”

Martin knew he probably had, but no surgeon would ever say, “I know I have.”

He was awestruck.

A fine surgeon is an artist, thought Martin. All eyes are
on him. He may be a simple, modest man like Albeniz or a bully like some others I’ve seen. But either way he is respected: he has a great gift. What I should wish is to be like Dr. Albeniz.