Doctors (65 page)

“Do you realize, Emily, that all the early Dodger heroes had a single-digit uniform? Then Jackie Robinson shows up and they give him forty-two? Do you think that’s just coincidence?”

“No, you’ve got a point,” she answered, “because they gave Campy—the second Dodger black man—number thirty-nine. As a doctor, what do you make of that?”

“Well,” Barney began, “in my professional opinion, I’d say—absolutely nothing. I personally always used to ask for number ten—not in the major leagues, I hasten to say.”

“I know,” said Emily Greenwood cheerfully.

“Know what?”

“I know you used to be a basketball jock—before you got so intellectual. Actually, I’ve got a confession to make—I hope you won’t psychoanalyze it too much.” And then she confided, “I used to have a thing about your legs.”

Barney did not know quite how to react. Was this some trendy new locution among the East Side swingers? (“Would you like to come up and see my kneecaps?”) He responded with a similar tone of levity.

“That’s very flattering, Em. I mean, I don’t think anyone’s ever said anything that nice—or off-the-wall—to me.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not some kind of fetishist. I was two years behind you at Midwood.”

“You were at Midwood—how come I never noticed you?”

“Well, I guess you were too busy romancing the cheerleaders. Anyway I used to photograph the games for the
Argus.
Actually, I’ve always wondered why you didn’t play senior year—you would have made All-City First Team for sure. I mean, you weren’t just good on offense, you were a tiger on defense. Whatever happened?”

Elated by her admiration for his erstwhile sporting exploits, Barney replied in laconic, Gary Cooper fashion, “It’s a long, sad story, Emily. I don’t think you’d want to hear it.”

“I’ve got plenty of time,” she said, smiling.

Her innocent remark made him glance at his watch. It was four-fifteen.

“Hey, Em, the captain’s looking razor blades at us. I think he’ll kill us if we don’t get out of here.”

“Don’t be so paranoid, Barney, Dmitri lets me stay forever. I’m his connection for tickets to the Super Bowl.”

“Don’t you have a date—or work to do?”

“No, to the first; yes, to the second. And you?”

“The same. But let’s forget the pages yet unwritten. And as the Latin poet says, ‘Seize the Day.’ ”

“You’re right,” she answered. “
Carpe diem.
’ ”

And as they walked out Barney thought to himself, I’d really like to “seize” you, too, Emily.

After another few blocks of high-spirited conversation, Barney realized,
Now
I really know what euphoric means.

I
t was a November Saturday morning, crisp as an autumn apple, and the normally brown and stone-gray Yale campus was enlivened by blue-and-white football scarves, blond-haired Vassar girls, and undergraduates’ cheeks red from excitement, football fever, and the cold.

Bennett had gotten off duty at 10
A.M.
After assisting Rick Zeltman on an eight-hour “plumbing job” (which is how the senior surgeon had referred to the complex genito-urinary procedure), he was bushed from the mental strain as well as the physical effort. But much too excited to go straight to bed.

He strolled over toward the college campus with the thought of dropping by the Co-op and picking up a book to take his mind off blood and guts.

Street vendors were out in force, hawking balloons, pins,
and other paraphernalia. The undergraduates looked like children to him. Christ, he thought, have I grown old so quickly? What’s been going on since I was locked inside that concrete and linoleum dungeon where there’s no day, no night, no change of season? Ten years ago I walked in like a young lion, and now I suddenly feel like an old goat.

As Bennett crossed Chapel Street toward Broadway, a young black selling newspapers approached him.

“Hey brother,” he called out, “have you got the news? Are you tuned in? If not, better buy this document. Just two bits, brother, and you’ll find out where it’s at.”

Bennett reached into his pocket, gave the boy a quarter, put the paper underneath his arm, and walked away.

Half an hour later he was home with fifteen dollars’ worth of books that, if he was lucky, he’d read between that afternoon and next July. He turned on his stereo, kicked off his loafers, and sat down to read.

But he was so zonked from cutting, tying off blood vessels, suturing—and most of all worrying if he was doing everything correctly—that even the stylistic pratfalls of Tom Wolfe’s
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
could not hold his attention. As a kind of last resort, he started to glance over the latest Panther news.

The paper’s rhetoric was strident and virulently antiwhite. Hell, Bennett thought, I’ll skip the heavy stuff. Maybe they’ve got a sports section.

He flipped through the final pages and was happy to come upon some cartoons. Ah, he thought to himself, just the level of literature I need right now.

And then he began to read one. But after the initial obscene caricatures of “Filthy Jewpigs ripping off Blacks,” he hurled the paper to the floor and stormed out of his apartment into the chill New Haven wind.

He found Jack in the orderly room.

“Hi there, Ben baby,” Jack greeted him—forsaking the usual hospital formalities, since the other orderlies regarded Bennett more or less as “one of them.”

“I’d like a word with you,” Bennett said sternly.

“Certainly, Doctor.”

The two men stepped into the empty corridor. Bennett was about to explode with the tirade he had prepared en route to the hospital. (“Is this all you can write in that filthy rag of yours?”)

But he realized that to vent his anger on poor Jack would
serve no purpose. He was not the editor, he was not a leader, he was just a simple foot soldier fighting for a cause in a foreign land known as America.

So he reined in his fury and said simply, “I’d like to come to the next meeting, Jack.”

“Change of heart, Doc?”

“You might say that.”

“Okay, I’ll let you know.”

The chief resident had been in the Emergency Room of Boston Children’s Hospital admitting a nine-year-old girl with a dangerously high FUO (fever of unknown origin), which she suspected signaled endocarditis.

By the time Laura had finished writing up everything, it was after midnight. She was heading for the on-call sleeping room when she noticed that the normally sedate voices at the nurses’ station were unusually loud and excited.

One of the women called from afar, “Laura, did you see the eleven o’clock news tonight?”

“No,” she said, too exhausted to be aroused by anything other than World War IV (she was sure she was tired enough to sleep through World War III). “What did I miss?”

“It’s wild, Laura. Absolutely wild,” said the youngest—and normally the most reticent among them. “It’s a really raunchy Washington scandal about two doctors—the woman surgeon was from Harvard and about your age.”

Laura instantly knew who this had to be. Her heart began to race and she blurted out, “Did one of them commit suicide?”

“Tried to. Nearly three hundred mg’s of Valium. But they reached the stomach pump in time. The woman doctor was positively gorgeous.”

Laura, half in shock, muttered, “Grete Andersen?”

“Yes,” a nurse replied. “That was her name. Did you know her?”

Laura asked anxiously, “Was there any brain damage? Just what did that damn psychiatrist do?”

The nurses looked surprised.

“Why,
he
was the one that took the pills,” one of them replied.

Laura held her head, for she was growing dizzy.

A nurse named Nida came up and asked solicitously, “Laura, are you all right? Is Dr. Himmernan a friend of yours as well?”

“No, no,” she said still in confusion, allowing herself to be
led to a plastic armchair in one of the waiting alcoves. “I’d be grateful if someone would tell me just what the newscast said.”

“Well,” Nida began, “this doctor is supposed to be a really world-class honcho in psychiatry.”

“Forget the credentials. What did he do?”

“Well, to put it mildly, what he shouldn’t have been doing with a patient. Your friend was very cool—”

“—and brave,” said another nurse.

“She called a press conference at the Georgetown Hospital.”

“She what?” Laura asked, certain she was imagining all this. “Why the hell would the press come to listen to some surgical resident?”

“First of all, she’s stunning,” Nida answered, “and, most of all, they love this sort of juicy scandal. Anyway, she said that she’d gone to Himmerman for treatment and he’d ended up in bed with her.”

“But how the hell could she prove it?”

“Oh, that was the interesting part. At first this Dr. Himmerman—who’s incredibly handsome, by the way—spoke to the cameras and denied it all. He said it was some kind of paranoid delusion and that ‘the poor girl’ should be in a mental institution. He was very convincing.”

“I’ll bet he was,” Laura muttered.

Nida’s next words were a bolt from the blue: “Then he just turned and walked up the steps of his townhouse—a beautiful place in Georgetown, by the way—went upstairs, and swallowed all those pills.”

“Oh,” said Laura, now elated. “So the sonovabitch turned out to be his own worst enemy. Hurray for Andersen.”

“Grete, are you okay? I’ve been trying to reach you for nearly two weeks.”

“Sorry Laura, it’s just that I’ve had to move in with a girlfriend because my phone was ringing off the hook. I should have called you sooner—I’m sorry.”

“Hey, how did you get the guts to blow the whistle on that unethical bastard? What made you do it?”

“Somebody had to. Do you know that Andy swore he’d leave his wife and marry me? Then I found out he used that line about a million times.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“From none other than Mrs. H herself. We met as I was coming out from my session. She looked me up and down and
suddenly flew off the handle and said, ‘You must be Andy’s latest Barbie doll.’ Then she stormed right into his office and started screaming. What happened after that will probably appear in the next
National Enquirer.
”

“Oh, Grete, I feel so sorry for you. I hope this lousy experience doesn’t turn you off men in general.”

“Well, to tell the truth, they’re not my favorite gender at the moment. And as for male
doctors
, they’re just about the lowest form of life. I’ll give you three guesses who has to get out of town as a result of this scandal.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well,” Grete replied, “it seems the Surgical Department here thinks I’m not cutting it—to coin a phrase. So they’ve offered someone else the senior residency and informed me that, though I was ‘welcome to stay,’ I wouldn’t have a stipend and I’d have to slog my guts out as a volunteer.”

“In other words, they fired you.”

“Well,” Grete replied sarcastically, “you might say so. In fact, ‘fired’ was the only word they
didn’t
use. These doctors are like a fraternity or some secret society. My sin apparently wasn’t that I allowed myself to be seduced, but that I told the press.”

“Grete, I’m absolutely speechless. You mean that creep is gonna get away scot-free?”

“Probably. I mean, naturally they’re going through the motions. He’ll have to testify before some County Board—in private, naturally. But he still maintains that I’m a hysteric who fantasized the whole thing. Anyway, I’m resigned to leaving, so I’m writing to practically every hospital from here to Honolulu. And if all else fails, I’ll join the Army.”

“What?” Laura said with incredulity.

“I’m serious. They need surgeons badly. They would probably even ship me to Vietnam.” And with the pain audible in her voice, she commented, “Frankly, Laura, if I got my head shot off it couldn’t hurt much more than it hurts now.”

For the first time in their marriage, Laura and Palmer had almost identically punishing schedules. No longer did he complain when she came home at 4
A.M.
For he himself was wide awake, having spent the midnight hours in the intensive study of Vietnamese.

As she entered the room he removed his reading glasses, looked at her, and smiled. “You know, my darling, I’m beginning
to have respect for what you’re going through. I mean, this lack of sleep is absolutely killing me.”

“Actually, Palmer, it’s a tried and true technique for breaking prisoners of war. I’m told it’s very popular in Southeast Asia.”

“Oh? Who told you that?”

“
The New York Times.
”

“And you believe that Commie rag?”

“My God, Palmer,” she remarked, only half in jest, “sometimes you make Barry Goldwater sound like a Berkeley radical.”

Laura poured herself a glass of orange juice, sat down wearily, and mused, “I’d like to know just what the hell it is about you men that makes you go on having wars and killing one another. Maybe it’s all that testosterone—I mean, the androgen’s a potent stimulant.”

“I just thought that it stimulated sex,” Palmer said, smiling.

“Well, there’s always been a vague connection between love and war, hasn’t there? Take Helen of Troy—”

“At this point, I’d rather take you,” said Palmer, erising from behind his desk.

“Do you think tonight was the night?” he asked.

They were lying side by side in bed, relaxing drowsily.

“Palmer,” she replied sleepily, “if Medical Science had invented a machine that could pinpoint ovulation I would have sneaked it home from the hospital under my raincoat.”

“Well, anyway, it’s not necessary,” Palmer reasoned. “I mean, if we do it every night we’re bound to catch the right time, aren’t we?”

“Speaking professionally, Palmer, it takes the average ‘Olympic’ couple, as they call them, four to six months to conceive a baby. And sometimes longer if you’ve been on the Pill.”

“I think a lot of it is psychological,” he commented. “If you really put your mind to it, I’m sure you could succeed straight away. Take my own parents—I doubt that they’ve made love more than half a dozen times in their entire marriage, but they’ve got me and my sister to show for it. Anyway, what do you think we should call him?”