Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (294 page)

“It’s a great feeling,” said Bill. “I got a big kick out of that actinomycosis business.”

“You look tired for your age,” said Doctor Norton suddenly. “At twenty-five you shouldn’t be existing entirely on nervous energy, Bill, and that’s what you’re doing. The people you grew up with say they never see you. Why not take a couple of hours a week away from the hospital, if only for the sake of your patients? You took so many chemistry tests of Mr. Doremus that we almost had to give him blood transfusions to build him up again.”

“I was right,” said Bill eagerly.

“But a little brutal. Everything would have developed in a day or two. Take it gently, like your friend Schoatze. You’re going to know a lot about internal medicine some day, but you’re trying to rush things.”

But Bill was a man driven; he tried more Sunday afternoons with current débutantes, but in the middle of a conversation he would find his mind drifting back to those great red building blocks of an Idea, where alone he could feel the pulse of life.

The news that a famous character in politics was leaving the Coast and coming to the hospital for the diagnosis of some obscure malady had the effect of giving him a sudden interest in politics. He looked up the record of the man and followed his journey east, which occupied half a column daily in the newspapers; party issues depended on his survival and eventual recovery.

Then one August afternoon there was an item in the society column which announced the engagement of Helen, débutante daughter of Mrs. Truby Ponsonby Day, to Dr. Howard Durfee. Bill’s reconciled world turned upside down. After an amount of very real suffering, he had accepted the fact that Thea was the mistress of a brilliant surgeon, but that Dr. Durfee should suddenly cut loose from her was simply incredible.

Immediately he went in search of her, found her issuing from the nurses’ ward in street clothes. Her lovely face, with the eyes that held for him all the mystery of people trying, all the splendor of a goal, all reward, all purpose, all satisfaction, was harried with annoyance; she had been stared at and pitied.

“If you like,” she answered, when he asked if he could run her home, and then: “Heaven help women! The amount of groaning over my body that took place this afternoon would have been plenty for a war.”

“I’m going to help you,” he said. “If that guy has let you down--”

“Oh, shut up! Up to a few weeks ago I could have married Howard Durfee by nodding my head--that’s just what I wouldn’t tell those women this afternoon. I think you’ve got discretion, and that’ll help you a lot when you’re a doctor.”

“I am a doctor,” he said somewhat stiffly.

“No, you’re just an interne.”

He was indignant and they drove in silence. Then, softening, she turned toward him and touched his arm.

“You happen to be a gentleman,” she said, “which is nice sometimes--though I prefer a touch of genius.”

“I’ve got that,” Bill said doggedly. “I’ve got everything, except you.”

“Come up to the apartment and I’ll tell you something that no one else in this city knows.”

It was a modest apartment but it told him that at some time she had lived in a more spacious world. It was all reduced, as if she had hung on to several cherished things, a Duncan Phyfe table, a brass by Brancusi, two oil portraits of the ‘50’s.

“I was engaged to John Gresham,” she said. “Do you know who he was?”

“Of course,” he said. “I took up the subscription for the bronze tablet to him.”

John Gresham had died by inches from radium poisoning, got by his own experiments.

“I was with him till the end,” Thea went on quickly, “and just before he died he wagged his last finger at me and said, ‘I forbid you to go to pieces. That doesn’t do any good.’ So, like a good little girl, I didn’t go to pieces, but I toughened up instead. Anyhow, that’s why I never could love Howard Durfee the way he wanted to be loved, in spite of his nice swagger and his fine hands.”

“I see.” Overwhelmed by the revelation, Bill tried to adjust himself to it. “I knew there was something far off about you, some sort of--oh, dedication to something I didn’t know about.”

“I’m pretty hard.” She got up impatiently. “Anyhow, I’ve lost a good friend today and I’m cross, so go before I show it. Kiss me good-by if you like.”

“It wouldn’t mean anything at this moment.”

“Yes, it would,” she insisted. “I like to be close to you. I like your clothes.”

Obediently he kissed her, but he felt far off from her and very rebuffed and young as he went out the door.

He awoke next morning with the sense of something important hanging over him; then he remembered. Senator Billings, relayed by crack trains, airplanes and ambulances, was due to arrive during the morning, and the ponderous body which had housed and expelled so much nonsense in thirty years was to be at the mercy of the rational at last.

“I’ll diagnose the old boy,” he thought grimly, “if I have to invent a new disease.”

He went about his routine work with a sense of fatigue that morning. Perhaps Doctor Norton would keep this plum to himself and Bill wouldn’t have a chance at him. But at eleven o’clock he met his senior in a corridor.

“The senator’s come,” he said. “I’ve formed a tentative opinion. You might go in and get his history. Go over him quickly and give him the usual laboratory work-up.”

“All right,” said Bill, but there was no eagerness in his voice. He seemed to have lost all his enthusiasm. With his instruments and a block of history paper, he repaired to the senator’s room.

“Good morning,” he began. “Feeling a little tired after your trip?”

The big barrel of a man rolled toward him.

“Exhausted,” he squeaked unexpectedly. “All in.”

Bill didn’t wonder; he felt rather that way himself, as if he had travelled thousands of miles in all sorts of conveyances until his insides, including his brains, were all shaken up together.

He took the case history.

“What’s your profession?”

“Legislator.”

“Do you use any alcohol?”

The senator raised himself on one arm and thundered, “See here, young man; I’m not going to be heckled! As long as the Eighteenth Amendment--” He subsided.

“Do you use any alcohol?” Bill asked again patiently.

“Why, yes.”

“How much?”

“A few drinks every day. I don’t count them. Say, if you look in my suitcase you’ll find an X-ray of my lungs, taken a few years ago.”

Bill found it and stared at it with a sudden feeling that everything was getting a little crazy.

“This is an X-ray of a woman’s stomach,” he said.

“Oh--well, it must have got mixed up,” said the senator. “It must be my wife’s.”

Bill went into the bathroom to wash his thermometer. When he came back he took the senator’s pulse, and was puzzled to find himself regarded in a curious way.

“What’s the idea?” the senator demanded. “Are you the patient or am I?” He jerked his hand angrily away from Bill. “Your hand’s like ice. And you’ve put the thermometer in your own mouth.”

Only then did Bill realize how sick he was. He pressed the nurse’s bell and staggered back to a chair with wave after wave of pain chasing across his abdomen.

III

He awoke with a sense that he had been in bed for many hours. There was fever bumping in his brain, a pervasive weakness in his body, and what had wakened him was a new series of pains in his stomach. Across the room in an armchair sat Dr. George Schoatze, and on his knee was the familiar case-history pad.

“What the hell,” Bill said weakly. “What the hell’s the matter with me? What happened?”

“You’re all right,” said George. “You just lie quiet.”

Bill tried to sit upright, but found he was too weak.

“Lie quiet!” he repeated incredulously. “What do you think I am--some dumb patient? I asked you what’s the matter with me?”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to find out. Say, what is your exact age?”

“My age!” Bill cried. “A hundred and ten in the shade! My name’s Al Capone and I’m an old hophead. Stick that on your God damn paper and mail it to Santa Claus. I asked you what’s the matter with me.”

“And I say that’s what we’re trying to find out,” said George, staunch, but a little nervous. “Now, you take it easy.”

“Take it easy!” cried Bill. “When I’m burning up with fever and a half-wit interne sits there and asks me how many fillings I’ve got in my teeth! You take my temperature, and take it right away!”

“All right--all right,” said George conciliatingly. “I was just going to.”

He put the thermometer in Bill’s mouth and felt for the pulse, but Bill mumbled, “I’ll shake my ode pulse,” and pulled his hand away. After two minutes George deftly extracted the thermometer and walked with it to the window, an act of treachery that brought Bill’s legs out of bed.

“I want to read that thermometer!” he cried. “Now, you look here! I want to know what’s on that thermometer!”

George shook it down quickly and put it in its case.

“That isn’t the way we do things here,” he said.

“Oh, isn’t it? Well, then, I’ll go somewhere where they’ve got some sense.”

George prepared a syringe and two small plates of glass.

Bill groaned. “Do you think for a moment I’m going to let you do that? I taught you everything you know about blood chemistry. By God, I used to do your lessons for you, and you come here to make some clumsy stab into my arm!”

Perspiring fluently, as was his wont under strain, George rang for a nurse, with the hope that a female presence would have a calming effect on Bill. But it was not the right female.

“Another nitwit!” Bill cried as she came in. “Do you think I’m going to lie here and stand more of this nonsense? Why doesn’t somebody do something? Where’s Doctor Norton?”

“He’ll be here this afternoon.”

“This afternoon! I’ll probably be dead by this afternoon. Why isn’t he here this morning? Off on some social bat and I lie here surrounded by morons who’ve lost their heads and don’t know what to do about it. What are you writing there--that my ‘tongue protrudes in mid-line without tremor’? Give me my slippers and bathrobe. I’m going to report you two as specimens for the nerve clinic.”

They pressed him down in bed, whence he looked up at George with infinite reproach.

“You, that I explained a whole book of toxicology to, you’re presuming to diagnose
me.
Well, then,
do
it! What have I got? Why is my stomach burning up? Is it appendicitis? What’s the white count?”

“How can I find out the white count when--”

With a sigh of infinite despair at the stupidity of mankind, Bill relaxed, exhausted.

Doctor Norton arrived at two o’clock. His presence should have been reassuring, but by this time the patient was too far gone in nervous tension.

“Look here, Bill,” he said sternly. “What’s all this about not letting George look into your mouth?”

“Because he deliberately gagged me with that stick,” Bill cried. “When I get out of this I’m going to stick a plank down that ugly trap of his.”

“Now, that’ll do. Do you know little Miss Cary has been crying? She says she’s going to give up nursing. She says she’s never been so disillusioned in her life.”

“The same with me. Tell her I’m going to give it up too. After this, I’m going to kill people instead of curing them. Now when I need it nobody has even tried to cure
me.
”

An hour later Doctor Norton stood up.

“Well, Bill, we’re going to take you at your word and tell you what’s what. I’m laying my cards on the table when I say we don’t know what’s the matter with you. We’ve just got the X-rays from this morning, and it’s pretty certain it’s not the gall bladder. There’s a possibility of acute food poisoning or mesenteric thrombosis, or it may be something we haven’t thought of yet. Give us a chance, Bill.”

With an effort and with the help of a sedative, Bill got himself in comparative control; only to go to pieces again in the morning, when George Schoatze arrived to give him a hypodermoclysis.

“But I can’t stand it,” he raged. “I never could stand being pricked, and you have as much right with a needle as a year-old baby with a machine gun.”

“Doctor Norton has ordered that you get nothing by mouth.”

“Then give it intravenously.”

“This is best.”

“What I’ll do to you when I get well! I’ll inject stuff into you until you’re as big as a barrel! I will! I’ll hire somebody to hold you down!”

Forty-eight hours later, Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze had a conference in the former’s office.

“So there we are,” George was saying gloomily. “He just flatly refuses to submit to the operation.”

“H’m.” Doctor Norton considered. “That’ bad.”

“There’s certainly danger of a perforation.”

“And you say that his chief objection--”

“--that it was my diagnosis. He says I remembered the word ‘volvulus’ from some lecture and I’m trying to wish it on him.” George added uncomfortably: “He always was domineering, but I never saw anything like
this.
Today he claims it’s acute pancreatitis, but he doesn’t have any convincing reasons.”

“Does he know I agree with your opinion?”

“He doesn’t seem to believe in anybody,” said George uncomfortably. “He keeps fretting about his father; he keeps thinking he could help him if he was alive.”

“I wish that there was someone outside the hospital he had some faith in,” Norton said. An idea came to him: “I wonder--” He picked up the telephone and said to the operator: “I wish you’d locate Miss Singleton, Doctor Durfee’s anaesthetist. And when she’s free, ask her to come and see me.”

Bill opened his eyes wearily when Thea came into his room at eight that night.

“Oh, it’s you,” he murmured.

She sat on the side of his bed and put her hand on his arm.

“H’lo, Bill,” she said.

“H’lo.”

Suddenly he turned in bed and put both arms around her arm. Her free hand touched his hair.

“You’ve been bad,” she said.

“I can’t help it.”

She sat with him silently for half an hour; then she changed her position so that her arm was under his head. Stooping over him, she kissed him on the brow. He said: