Doctors (28 page)

“I say I’m just a mediocre ballplayer. If you’re looking for class, why not ask Ben Landsmann? He’s actually played semi-pro ball for Fiat-Torino.”

“We know,” Skip replied in Bogart tones. “We’ve already had a chat with him.”

“And?” Barney asked.

“He’s on the fence,” the redhead explained, “says he’d do it if you did.”

“Hey, guys,” Skip continued, once again taking the floor. “Ben’s got a much bigger room. Why don’t we all go up there and talk this over?”

Barney took a deep breath and stood up.

“He’s not that tall,” Curlyhair could not keep himself from remarking.

“Don’t sweat it,” the redhead responded. “On the court you’d think he was George Mikan.”

The flattering comparison to the legendary Minneapolis Lakers center sent adrenaline coursing through Barney’s body. Before leaving with the trio he grabbed his Columbia Varsity sweater and threw it over his shoulders. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.

Ten minutes later they were all on their hands and knees on the carpeted floor of Bennett Landsmann’s room, studying various strategic documents.

“The problem with the damn Law School,” Skip explained, “is that they accept animals. I mean, they actually have two gorillas who’ve played pro ball.”

And, alluding to Bennett, added, “I don’t mean spaghetti leagues, I mean the NBA. I mean, they’ve got Mack “The Truck” Wilkinson—”

“The New York Knicks center?” Bennett and Barney said in astonished near-unison, to which Skip added somberly, “All seven-foot-one of him.”

“On the other hand,” Barney offered, trying to bolster team spirit, “the guy’s retired. He’s old. I mean Mack must be thirty-two or -three at least.”

“He’s thirty-five, actually,” said Curlyhair. “Moves like molasses.”

“Slower than that,” said Skip, “the guy can’t move at all.” He paused and then revealed the zinger. “I’ve sent some
spies to the Law School gym to check him out and all he does now is stand in the keyhole and
lean.
”

“Come on,” Bennett complained, “that’s not legal.”

“Tell that to the Law School,” Skip retorted. “They’ve their own definitions of fair and foul.”

To which Curlyhair added, “These lawyers are the dirtiest players you’ve ever seen. And what they’ll be like this year with the Jolly Green Giant makes me absolutely shudder. Don’t you agree, Livingston?”

Barney had now become totally involved. “Come on, guys,” he urged, “if he can’t move, we’ll just have to stay the hell out of his way. We can run our plays from the corners.”

“You really think you can go sixty minutes without coming into contact with Mack The Truck?” Skip inquired incredulously.

Barney nodded. “If there’s one thing you can say about my glorious career, it’s that I was the opposite of King Lear. I’ve sinned more than I’ve been sinned against.”

Bennett looked at his classmate with an indulgent smile. “I’m gonna remind you of that when you’re in the Brigham with a broken back, Barn.” He turned back to Skip. “Are there only five of us?”

“We’ve got another three or four possibilities,” Skip replied, “but our great white hope—excuse me, Bennett, that was a metaphor—is chief surgical resident at Mass General. If he played hookey, we just might be responsible for a few deaths. Anyway, we’ll be seven or eight at least, but our real prospects for bringing back that cup are in this room. So let’s say we meet for practice in the Vanderbilt gym at midnight, starting tomorrow.”

“Midnight?” Bennett cringed.

“It’s the only time all of us can break loose. Anybody got anything else to say?”

Fired with team spirit, Barney Livingston pronounced the benediction. “Fellow doctors, may I remind you of the immortal words of William Shakespeare. To be precise, in
Henry VI
,
Part II
, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ ”

Nocturnal joggers on Avenue Louis Pasteur at that moment were startled to hear several lusty male voices bellowing from a third-floor window in Vanderbilt Hall, “Kill the lawyers!” The simplest conclusion was that a group of their fellow med students had been experimenting with LSD.

Laura had responded to the more grisly aspects of Med School in curiously different ways. In the dog lab she had been
hopelessly emotional. By contrast, in Pathology, which brought her into close contact with foul diseases and mephitic substances, she was strangely unruffled. For she had reminded herself that the course would only last a few months, the aggregate discomfort adding up to a mere few dozen hours.

By contrast, her father, when he first came to America, had been forced to work for nearly five years at this stultifying drudgery before he was finally licensed to practice.

The caprices of alphabetization found Laura and Grete Andersen working at adjacent tables in Pathology, each with a male lab partner they were meeting for the first time.

Late one afternoon, Bruce, the diligent assistant, approached them, carrying a rectangular plastic container that looked like the ones that held ice cream in supermarkets.

“I’ve got a wonderful surprise for you,” he announced jauntily. “Your first fresh specimen—straight from an O.R. in the Brigham and barely an hour old.”

“What is it, Bruce?” Laura asked warily.

“Never fear, Laura, you don’t have to be Professor Boyd to recognize this one.” He placed the box on the table. The girls and their partners drew near as he removed the lid.

Grete gave a little gasp and turned her face away in horror. Though even their two male partners were manifestly sickened, Laura resolutely kept her gaze on the contents.

It was a female breast—obviously sliced from a Caucasian woman. The nipple was slightly discolored but still recognizable, crowning a pathetic sack of yellow globules.

“Well?” asked the grinning assistant, “haven’t I earned your eternal gratitude? After all, the one sure thing you can count on during your clinical training is cancer of the boob. Uh—you did notice the carcinoma, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, we saw it,” murmured Laura’s partner, a crew-cut athletic type named Sheldon Burns, who was married and unsettled by the notion of this possibly happening to his own wife.

As casually as possible, Laura tapped Grete on the shoulder. “You see it, don’t you, Andersen? That little thing there that looks like a piece of gravel. That’s the carcinoma. Right, Bruce?”

“On target, Laura. A real nasty little rock it is, too.”

Like you, Brucie boy, Laura thought to herself.

“Well,” inquired the assistant, affecting impatience, “is one of you gonna take it, or shall I offer this valuable specimen to a rival team?”

The lab partners glanced at one another. It was immediately obvious that Grete was not up to the task. Before Laura could gather the courage to reach for it, Sheldon leaned across her and scooped up the gelatinous tissue with both his hands.

“That poor woman,” Grete thought out loud.

“C’mon now, Grete,” the assistant chided, “we’re supposed to be clinical about this sort of thing.”

“Of course we are, Bruce,” Laura retorted sarcastically, “that’s why next Christmas we’re gonna give you a cancerous gonad.”

The assistant beat a hasty retreat.

“What do we do now?” Sheldon asked nervously.

“See if we can get some of that carcinoma on a slide,” said Laura, trying to maintain a clinical air.

Sheldon nodded and placed the specimen on a lab tray.

“This is very upsetting,” he said with candor.

“Yes,” Laura agreed. “I wonder how it felt.”

“The woman was obviously under anesthesia,” Grete asserted.

“No,” Laura replied thoughtfully. “I mean, I wonder how the doctor felt when he cut this off.”

In the end, Skip Elsas had only been able to recruit a total of eight gladiators willing to face the Godzilla of Mack “The Truck” and company. Med students who had played the lawyers once rarely came back for more.

On the big night, they had their training meal in Howard Johnson’s on Memorial Drive: minute steak, baked potatoes, and hot fudge sundaes. Barney was at once heartened and surprised when Skip announced that their meal had been sponsored by the dean’s office.

“So they really do care?” Bennett asked.

“Only like something approximating life and death. I’ve heard an unofficial rumor that Holmes makes an annual bet with his opposite number at the school for ambulance chasers—for one thousand smackers.”

“Jesus,” one of the athletes gasped. “That means he’ll kill us if we lose.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Skip answered with a straight face. “If we don’t win, we have every chance of ending up as cadavers for next year’s freshmen.”

*    *    *

Hemenway Gym was packed. The audience was mostly lawyers and their dates, since the Med School was, after all, far away across the river in Boston.

The visiting doctors took the floor to a tidal wave of boos and booze. But, trained to maintain clinical sangfroid, they went about the business of warming up in orderly fashion. As he stretched and warmed up, Barney noticed that sitting front and center was not merely Dean Holmes but every gray eminence in the entire Med School. What the hell, he said to himself, I’ve known pressure before. These old farts won’t scare me. I’m sure glad I convinced Castellano to stay home and study.

And then it happened.

He was so gigantic that his huge form seemed to block out the overhead lights. Mack “The Truck” Wilkinson, all 348 pounds of him, a colossus that made the sculptures in the temple at Luxor seem like miniatures, lumbered his way to the court—the basketball looking like a grape in his massive paw.

“Christ,” Barney whispered to Bennett, “the guy’s obese. I mean it, he’s clinically obese.”

“Would you care to go tell the man himself?” Bennett smiled.

“I just might,” Barney replied, “after the game. When I have a running start …”

The doctors’ game plan was simple: Under the assumption that the lawyers were out of shape—Wilkinson being the prime but not sole example—they would play a running game and exploit the enemy’s inevitable fatigue in the second half.

And so they marshaled their energy, so much so that in the initial jump-off, Skip Elsas did not even go through the motions of trying to get the ball, but let Wilkinson slap it to a teammate. To the med students’ immense relief, the lawyers were only leading by six points as the halftime buzzer sounded.

In the locker room, Skip addressed his players with professional concern. “Be sure to drink a lot of liquids, guys. It’s hot as hell in there. I wouldn’t be surprised if those lawyers didn’t have the heat turned up on purpose. I sure as hell wish we’d brought some salt pills.”

“I’ve got some tablets,” said a distinguished voice, from the other side of a row of lockers. It was Dean Holmes, carrying his black bag. In an instant the players were swallowing a compound that would replace not only their sodium loss but their depleted electrolytes as well.

“How’s it going out there, men?” he asked paternally.

“They play an absolutely filthy game, sir,” Barney offered, giving what the dean did not realize was an expert opinion.

“I’ve noticed that, Livingston,” the other man replied. “In fact, they seem to be much worse than usual this year.”

“Yeah,” Barney added, “and then they go and hide behind Wilkinson as if he was a huge redwood tree.”

“Indeed,” Holmes concurred, “but by the same token he’s rooted to the ground.” He turned to their leader. “Skip, can’t you use his immobility to advantage?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve been holding back some fast-break patterns for the second half.”

“Good,” the dean said, nodding. “I’d best leave you to it, then.”

It was apparent from the very beginning of the second half that both sides were worn out. Thus the race would not be to the swift but rather to the less out-of-shape. And as the minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness, the game seemed to transform itself from basketball to a kind of homicidal football without pads.

Barney, who had never been afraid to dive headlong for the ball, found himself several times crushed by a
pile
of players who had jumped onto him. His knees were skinned, his ribs bruised. By midway in the final quarter, with the score tied 56–56, the doctors had precisely five players left. But they regained enough adrenaline to resume their running game.

Now, with an electrified crowd on its feet, they slowly began to pull ahead. Two, four, six—then seven points into the lead. And their hands were hot. Skip Elsas grabbed the rebound of a misfired legal shot and tossed it to Barney, who was already at halfcourt. He, in turn, whipped it to Bennett, who was now all alone before the lawyers’ basket, save for one guardian—Mack Wilkinson.

Bennett went in for a lay-up. Wilkinson went in for Bennett. There was a crash. A pileup. A whistle. Bennett seemed to have totally disappeared beneath a mountain of arms and legs.

Amazingly, the referees had called a foul against
Bennett
—for charging. But first they had to dislodge the tangled players from the floor. When three of his teammates finally hoisted The Truck, Bennett at last became visible. He was holding his ankle and writhing in agony.

“Ben—are you okay?” Barney asked anxiously.

“Goddammit,” he gasped, his face contorted in pain, “I think I’ve broken something. It hurts like hell.”

“Out of the way, out of the way,” said an imperious voice. It was Dean Holmes and two other Med School luminaries.

“Give this man air,” a second doctor demanded.

Barney and the other players downed cup after paper cupful of water while they pondered their predicament. What if Landsmann were unable to play on—would it be forfeit or four against five? Either way, the situation was grim.

More worried about Bennett than the game, Barney tried to see him. But the Med School eminences had totally surrounded the patient and one of the junior deans waved Barney off. Even the ref was unable to get a glimpse. The mandatory time-out was reaching its limit and he would have to insist the game continue.

Just as he blew his whistle the circle of doctors broke and Bennett once again became visible, being gently helped to his feet by a solicitous Dean Holmes. He stood gingerly on his right foot, then hobbled with a bit more confidence. He nodded to the ref that he was okay and made a reassuring gesture in Barney’s direction.