Specimen Days (12 page)

Catherine took the doctor's arm. They might have been lovers meeting. Catherine might have been the doctor's fiancee, taking his arm and insisting as a woman could that he accompany her on an errand she knew to be necessary. Lucas wondered if she and the doctor had met before.

The doctor frowned differently he had a language of frowns at Catherine's hand on his white-sleeved elbow. But, like a lover, he came with her. She led him among the bodies to where Lucas sat.

She said, "He's had his hand crushed at the works."

The doctor offered a new frown. He was a marvel of frowns. This one was canted, rakish.

The doctor said, "Someone over there has had his leg half torn off. The surgery rooms are full. We are doing all we can."

"He is a child."

"There are others here before him."

"He is a child who supports his parents, who does work much too hard for him, and he has had his hand crushed. His brother died less than a week ago. You must attend to him."

"We will attend to him presently." "You must do it now."

The doctor made his face darker. He retracted his eyes, made them smaller but brighter in his darkened face. "What did you say, miss?"

"I beg your pardon, sir," Catherine answered. "I don't mean to be rude. But please, please attend to this boy. As you can see, we're beside ourselves."

The doctor made a decision. It was easier, the doctor decided, to comply. Others were here before Lucas, but they would wait, as they'd learned to do.

"Come with me," the doctor said.

Dan helped Lucas to stand. He put his arm around Lucas's back and helped him walk, as Lucas had helped his mother back to bed once. When had that been? The doctor led them, though it seemed it should be Catherine who led.

They passed through the door. It opened onto a corridor that was full of other people. Like those in the waiting room they sat or lay upon the floor. They left a narrow aisle through which the not sick could pass. Lucas wondered if the hospital was like the works, if it was room after room, each different and each the same, leading on and on like a series of caverns until at some length they reached what? Healing itself. A living jewel, a ball of green-gold fire.

Dan helped Lucas along the path the afflicted had left for them. They had to step over a leg and then an extended arm that was strangely colored, bluish-white, like cheese. Lucas wondered if they were going toward the final room, where the healing was kept.

The room they entered was near the end of the corridor. It was an ordinary room, though nothing here was ordinary. It was small and dingily white. There were cabinets with glass fronts, and a chair and a cot. A sister sat upon the chair, bent over a man who was on the cot. The man, about Father's age but smaller, with longer hair, muttered to the sister.

The doctor said, "All right. Let's see."

It took Lucas a moment to know that the doctor wanted to see his hand. He'd thought the doctor meant something more general, something larger, though he could not have said what it was. He preferred his hand. Blood from the soaked rags dripped onto the floor. Lucas looked at the red drops. He thought, I'm hurt.

The doctor unwrapped the bandage. He didn't seem to mind about the blood. As the rag came away, the pain changed. It gathered in Lucas's hand. It had been all over him like a sickness, but now it was here; it followed the course of the bandages as they were pulled away, like sparks that were caught in his flesh, exquisite and excruciating. Lucas whimpered, though he hadn't wanted to. It seemed as if the bandage had joined him, as if the doctor without realizing his mistake were peeling Lucas's very skin away.

Then the bandage was gone. Here was his hand, revealed. It wasn't big anymore, as it had been at the works. It was small and curled in upon itself, like a chicken's foot. It was thickly red, as if it were made of blood. It looked like something dreadful, newly born.

He glanced nervously at Catherine. Would she be repulsed?

She merely said to him, "It's all right. It's going to be all right."

The doctor put the bandage into a can on the floor. The can contained other things as well. The doctor took Lucas's mangled hand in his palm, held it with sharp but weary attention. His new frown was broad and sternly beatific.

Catherine said, "What can you do for him?"

The doctor answered, "Remove the hand. Right away."

"No," she said. She seemed to possess a power not of knowledge but of divine refusal. It seemed possible it did not seem impossible that Catherine could restore his hand by insisting it be restored.

"Would you rather we wait and remove the whole arm?" the doctor said.

"It can't be as bad as that."

"Where did you receive your medical training, miss?"

"It's broken," she said. "It's badly broken but only that. Can't you set it?"

"Not here." "Elsewhere, then."

"There is no elsewhere. Not for him."

Lucas had never been talked about so, as if he were present and not present. It was like being in the works. There was something good there was something not bad about giving himself over.

"We'll find somewhere to take him," Catherine said. "With what money? Do you have money?" "Of course not."

"Let me tell you what will happen, then. You'll take him to New York Hospital or St. Vincent's. It will take time, perhaps considerable time, for you to see someone there, and that person will most likely send you back here. By the time you get back here it will be gangrenous, and we'll have to remove the arm, at the elbow if we're lucky and at the shoulder if we're not. Do you understand?"

Catherine hesitated. She looked to Dan. Lucas became visible then. Catherine saw him.

She said, "Lucas, I think we'd better let them do it."

He nodded. He soared above all feeling save for the pain and Catherine. Lucas was strangely excited. She regarded him with such concern, such deep and abiding love.

"Can you be brave?" she asked. He nodded again. He could be brave. "All right, then," she said to the doctor. "Wise girl," he answered.

"Can you get him to a bed now? Can you give him something for his pain?"

"We have no empty beds." "Surely one can be found."

"Should I evict the woman dying in the room next to this one? Should I put out the man whose heart is failing?"

"This is monstrous."

"A surgery room will be free in an hour or two. He will have to wait here until then."

"Some medicine, then. He doesn't show his pain. He wouldn't."

"We have very little medicine." "How can that be?"

"What we have, we must reserve for the gravest cases."

"This is a grave case."

"This is a boy about to lose his hand. When you compelled me to look at this boy, I had just left a man with a length of pipe driven through his skull. It entered here" the doctor indicated a place above his left ear "and came out here." He pointed to a spot just behind his right ear. "He is still alive, somehow. We have morphine for him."

Catherine hesitated. She looked around the room (where the man lay whispering on the cot under the sister's ministrations, where the jars stood behind the glass) as if she thought she might find an answer there. Finding none, she said to the doctor in a lowered voice, "Surely some provision can be made. As you can see, he is not quite right."

"Miss, this is a charity hospital. Half the people who come here are not quite right."

Catherine paused again. Lucas saw her make a decision.

She said to the doctor, "Could I speak to you privately?"

The doctor said, "Aren't we private enough here?"

She moved to the doorway, and the doctor followed. She spoke to him in a low tone. He nodded gravely.

Dan didn't speak. Lucas could feel him not speaking. The doctor listened to Catherine and produced yet another frown.

Lucas said, "The nine months' gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing."

Catherine said sharply, "Lucas, be quiet."

He strove to be quiet. He ground his teeth together.

The doctor and Catherine returned. The doctor said, "I will order him some morphine. Since you're so insistent."

"Thank you," Catherine answered. "I finish here at five o'clock." "I'll see you then."

The doctor said, "I'll send in one of the sisters with the morphine and fresh bandages. I'll return when the surgery room is free."

"All right," Catherine said.

The doctor left them. They were there, they three, in the room with the sister and the murmuring man.

Catherine said to Dan, "Well, then."

Dan didn't speak, though Catherine seemed to expect it. At length he said, "I must go back to the works."

"Yes," Catherine answered.

Lucas had not thought until that moment that anyone would return to his job. He'd forgotten. He'd been his hand and his pain, he'd been Catherine. But Dan must return to the works.

Lucas said to Catherine, "Will you stay with me?" "Of course I will," she answered. "You'll be all right," Dan told Lucas.

Lucas couldn't speak. He began to realize. He'd made an interruption and nothing more. If Dan must return to work now, Catherine would return tomorrow.

"You'll be all right," Dan said again, more slowly and distinctly, as if he were uncertain whether Lucas had heard him the first time.

Lucas said, "Which of the young men does she like best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her."

"Goodbye now." "Goodbye," Catherine said.

Dan regarded her strangely. His face resembled Catherine's face when Lucas brought her the bowl. Something had occurred between Dan and Catherine. She had shown him the bowl she'd paid too much for. She had shown him her mangled hand. She stood defiantly, harmed and proud.

Because there was nothing to do or say, Dan left. After he had gone, Catherine said to Lucas, "You must lie down. I'm afraid it will have to be the floor."

He answered, "I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me."

"Shh. Hush now. You must rest. You must rest and be quiet."

"I am satisfied I see, dance, laugh, sing."

"Come along now," Catherine said. "You make yourself worse by raving."

She helped him to lie down on the floor. She sat on the floor herself so he could lie with his head on her lap. Here under his head were the starchy folds of her blue dress.

He said, "You will stay with me?"

"I told you I would."

"Not only today."

"For as long as I need to."

Lucas was pain and Catherine's lap. The pain was a cocoon that wrapped him like fiery bandages. In the cocoon, in Catherine's lap, it was difficult to think of anything but that. Still, he struggled. He held to himself. He had brought her here, but he'd only saved her from today. He must do something further. He could not know what.

"Catherine?" he said.

"Shh. Don't speak."

"You have to come away with me."

"Forget about that. Forget everything."

He strove not to forget. He said, "You were wrong, yesterday."

"Not another word."

"You must take the baby and go away."

"Hush. Hush."

He saw it, through the fiery cocoon. She must take the baby and go to a place like the park at night, a place of grass and silence. She must go out searching, as Walt had told Lucas to do. There were such places, not only the park. He'd seen the pictures. There were fields and mountains. There were woods and lakes. He could take her to a place like that, he thought. He would find a way to do it.

From the cot, the man murmured on.

A sister came into the room. Her black habit was alive; it had created within itself her face, which was carved from wood. She wrapped Lucas's hand in new bandages. She produced (had it been inside her habit?) a syringe full of clear liquid. She took his other arm, the undamaged one, with the practiced calm of a boot maker nailing a sole. She put the needle in, which stung like a bee, a small pain, an interesting one, differently alive, like a tiny flame. She withdrew the needle and departed. She had not spoken at all. Because her face was carved from wood, she wasn't able to speak.

After some time, a flower blossomed in Lucas's mind. He felt it, an unfurling of petals, a transformation from bud to bloom. The pain was there still, but it was not in him anymore. The pain had left him as the spirit leaves the body of the deceased. It had made of itself a curtain, shimmering, as if curtains could be made of glass and the glass were veined with colors and tiny instances of light. The curtain hovered, fragile as glass, around Lucas and Catherine. It encircled them. Pain ran through it in capillaries of blue and green, of softest pink. Where it was most intense, pain produced watery quiverings of illumination, like light on a river. Pain surrounded them, and they were here, inside it.

Lucas didn't think he slept. He didn't think he dreamed. He was able, though, to see things he ordinarily saw in dreams. He saw that outside the pain curtain, outside the walls of the room, was the hospital, with its patiently damaged supplicants and its crying man. Outside the hospital was the city, with its houses and factories, its streets where Walt walked, marveling at everything, at smiths sweating over their forges and women strolling under feathered hats, at gulls circling in the sky like dreams the hats were having. Outside the city was the book, which invented what Walt saw and loved, because the book loved Walt and wanted to delight him. Outside the book… was there anything outside the book? Lucas couldn't be sure. He thought he saw a distance, an immensity that was in the book and outside it. He thought he saw fields and mountains, forests and lakes, though they were not as they appeared in the pictures. He had thought from pictures that they were flat and drab, all murky greens and limpid, shallow blues. He saw now that they were alive and brilliantly colored. There were oceans of grass, swaying. There were mountains blindingly white.