Doctors (69 page)

Barney’s wits were too sozzled to come up with an immediate answer. But Emily took over.

“Bunny, you’ll be the first to know,” she replied, feigning gaiety.

“No, no,” Barney protested. “
Me
first.”

Just after ten, Laura stood up.

“I hate to be a party-pooper, but I’ve got to catch the last plane back to Boston.”

Then Bennett rose as well. “I think it’s sack time for this young surgeon, too. But Laura, can I drop you? La Guardia’s right on the way to Yale.”

“Fine, Ben. You can fill me in on how you’ve been ‘cutting up’ lately.”

The two of them made the goodbye rounds. When Laura reached Barney, she whispered in his ear, “Emily’s terrific. Don’t let this one go.”

“I won’t,” he whispered back. He accompanied Laura and Bennett to the door. When he returned to the living room, Warren was putting on his jacket.

“I don’t know about you guys,” he jested, “but I work for a living, Bunny’s got to take the kids to school, and Momma’s looking kind of tired. So we’ll leave you two to bask in glory.”

He then turned to Emily and said, “Make my big brother come to Sunday dinner some time, willya? He’s so irresponsible.”

At last the population had decreased to two.

“Well,” said Barney, beaming at Emily with affection, “how did you like this evening?”

“She’s absolutely gorgeous.”

“What?”

“How come you never told me Laura was so beautiful?”

“Because she’s not,” he said straightforwardly. “I mean, compared to you—”

“C’mon, compared to her, I’m nothing. I’ll be frank with you, Barney. Just talking to her makes me feel incredibly insecure.”

“But why? She’s Mrs. Palmer Talbot. And we’re just—”

“Don’t give me that ‘platonic’ line again. Why don’t you admit there’s some special bond between the two of you? I mean, you did send her galleys of your book.”

“She’s a doctor—
and
a sports fan. What do I have to say to reassure you, Em?”

“You can’t.”

“What if I said marry me and I’ll never speak to Laura Castellano again? I won’t even ask her to the wedding.”

“Oh, Barn,” she moaned wearily, “let’s not go through this thing again.”

“All right, then,” he said firmly, “let’s just have it out once and for all. Why can’t you marry me? What the hell is stopping you?”

Emily began to cry. “I knew it. I just knew it would come down to this.”

“To
what
, goddammit?” This time he was determined not to let her off.

“I know you, Barney. Probably better than you know yourself. You don’t just want a wife, you want a family.”

“So what? It’s only natural when a man and woman love each other.”

Out of the blue, like a machine gun, she said, “Barney, I can’t have children.”

For a moment there was breathless silence.

“How do you know?” he asked softly.

“I had some problems when I was in college so they did a laparoscopy. They looked inside and saw my tubes were blocked, completely blocked. And before you ask—it can’t be cured by surgery.”

Barney did not know what to feel. But he knew what to say.

He knelt by her chair and whispered, “Emily, it’s you I love. Not some child I’ve never met.”

“Look, Barn, I’ve lived with you and I know the thing you want most in life is to be a father.”

Her sobs increased and her last words were barely audible. “And I can’t make you one.”

“Em, believe me,” Barney pleaded, “it won’t matter. We can always adopt—”

“You’d hate me for it some day,” she said with a tinge of anger, “even though you’d do the ‘noble’ thing. You’d stick with me and live in your
own
pain because you didn’t have your own kids.”

Then they both were silent.

In one sense Emily had proved she was right. Barney was in agony already.

“You won’t leave me, will you, Em?” he pleaded softly.

“No, Barn, I’ll be here until you kick me out.”

At least I’ll have another chance to talk to her, he thought—and to myself.

*    *    *

As usual, the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association was a chaotic potpourri of squabbles, tantrums, and an extraordinary amount of antisocial behavior. (After all, it was their area of expertise.)

Barney read a paper in the Literary Analysis session on “
Moby-Dick
and the American Psyche” and was gratified not only by its warm reception but the subsequent invitation to join the editorial board of the Association’s journal.

His joy, however, was not unalloyed. For, to his consternation, at the final plenary session the prize for the most distinguished work in Adolescent Psychiatry was awarded to the notorious Andrew Himmerman. So what if the guy wrote a brilliant monograph? How could a Society whose basic principle was to straighten minds honor someone who had so betrayed their code of ethics?

Maybe everything boils down to politics, Barney thought, but if I ever come face to face with that lecher, I’m going to tell him what I think of him.

Fate has a consistent caprice: She has ordained that in any men’s room—be it one with twenty, fifty, or even more urinals, if there are only two gentlemen present they will end up standing next to each other.

And this is how, at 4:38
P.M.
, Barney Livingston encountered Andrew Himmerman.

“Very much enjoyed your paper, Dr. Livingston,” the elder psychiatrist remarked.

Barney ignored him.

“Thought it was right on target,” Himmerman continued affably. “I assume you’ll be publishing it in the
Journal.
”

Barney was doing his best to make haste and retreat from this uncomfortable situation.

Himmerman was confused. “Have I done something to offend you, Doctor?” he inquired politely.

“No,” Barney finally retorted. “But you certainly did a job on a friend of mine.”

“Oh,” the psychiatrist said calmly, “and who may that be?”

“Sorry,” Barney replied sardonically, “I forgot there’ve been so many in your life that you can’t keep track. I was referring specifically to Grete Andersen, M.D.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Himmerman groaned.

They were washing their hands now, this time separated by three sinks’ length.

“I’d like to set the record straight, Dr. Livingston.”

Barney chose not to reply.

“You may not believe this,” Himmerman persisted, “but I never touched that girl. I don’t deny having acted improperly several years ago, but—”

Barney cut him off with a line of Marlowe’s, “ ‘But that was in another country: and besides, the wench is dead.’ ”

Himmerman blanched. When he finally could answer, it was obvious he was having trouble finding the proper words.

“I can’t tell you how that girl’s death hangs over me. My marriage is a shambles, my wife is paranoid now every time I talk to an attractive woman. I don’t sleep easy, I promise you.”

“You seem to have slept easily enough with Grete.”

“No, no! I had nothing to do with that girl. She was a complete hysteric. It was a total fantasy.”

“Dr. Himmerman,” Barney said, striving to control his temper to demonstrate his own psychic stability, “I’ve seen a photograph of the two of you. You were wearing tennis shorts. She had on a very skimpy bikini and you had your arms around each other. Eastman Kodak doesn’t sell fantasy film.”

“Oh, no,” Himmerman muttered under his breath. And then he asked angrily, “Did you study that photograph carefully?”

“Not under a microscope, but I gave it a good, hard look.”

“Then you should have noticed that she had her arms around me but not vice versa.”

“Are you denying that you took Grete to Hilton Head for a weekend tryst?”

“Dr. Livingston, if I told you there was no tryst, that the girl took
herself
—and, as far as I know, is still a virgin—would you believe me?”

“It would be difficult,” Barney responded.

“Well, let me offer you some irrefutable facts,” he persisted, anger rising in his voice. “The Psychiatric Association of the Southern States held its annual convention at Hilton Head over the weekend of April seventeenth and eighteenth, 1966. I was president at the time. Do you think I’d be crazy enough to take a patient to something like
that
?”

Barney still withheld judgment.

Himmerman continued. “I went down to the pool during our lunchtime break and all of a sudden this hysterical creature pops out of the bushes and gives me a hug. She had sweet-talked one of the lifeguards into taking that picture. I told her right on
the spot that our professional relationship was over and not to show up for her hour the next Monday.”

He paused, sighing at the uncomfortable recollection of the unhappy incident, and asked, “Does this sound plausible to you, Dr. Livingston?”

“Yes,” Barney conceded, “but why did you take the pills?”

Himmerman lowered his head. “I’m trying to be brutally honest. And it’s not easy, Doctor.”

“I know,” Barney said sympathetically.

“This girl’s problem—and now I’m speaking confidentially, doctor to doctor—is a morbid fear of men. She’s a classic hysteric, who gets frightened when she titillates a man and then runs away—”

He paused, and continued, “It’s my guess—and I hope it doesn’t sound too self-serving—that the transference was working and she was petrified of her feelings toward me. Her only escape was to discredit me as a love object. How the hell she did it I still haven’t found out, but somehow she got a look at my dossier in the Association’s files. Up till then it had all been kept out of the papers. I had sworn to the Ethics Committee I’d go back into therapy myself. That was the only condition under which my wife agreed to stay with me. Now this sick, sick woman was threatening to call a press conference and announce herself as the latest in a long string of sexual victims.”

He looked Barney in the eye and asked quietly, “If that happened to you—your career, your marriage, everything—all about to go up in smoke—for a lie—don’t you think you might momentarily lose control.…” His voice trailed off.

“Yes,” Barney said gently, for he now believed the man. “I guess I would. I’m sorry, Dr. Himmerman.”

D
eath reaped an awesome harvest in 1972.

Princes, presidents, and poets. Ice-cream men and athletes all left the earth a poorer place.

Ezra Pound—genius, traitor, madman—perished from the
earth, leaving, in his own words, “a deathless adornment/a name not to be worn out with the years.”

Charles Atlas, he who had begun life as a ninety-eight-pound weakling and become a paragon of muscles, the inspiration for all adolescent boys, could not chase off the bully Death when it kicked sand in his face. The hero who had once held up the world now had to leave it.

That pugnacious president, Harry Truman (who once threatened to beat up a critic who had panned his daughter’s singing), lost his final bout with life.

Maurice Chevalier, quintessential Gallic charmer, though perhaps less chivalrous than his own name implied (he’d entertained the Nazi troops), was taken only God knows in which direction.

The Duke of Windsor, who’d forsaken the role of king to become the slave of love, had now to abdicate his life.

A Being of still greater power than J. Edgar Hoover tapped the FBI chief’s line to say his time was up.

There really was a man called Howard Johnson, the inventor of the sundae. His life ended in this year, surely accompanied to heaven by an angel’s choir of no less than twenty-eight voices.

All too soon, The Reaper took off Jackie Robinson, aged only fifty-three.

Younger still were all the U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, whose death toll neared the fifty-thousand mark.

Indeed, perhaps it was no accident that in this devastating year the magazine called
Life
expired.

And Barney’s wounds from having been shot down—albeit metaphorically—had still not healed.

Publishers Weekly
’s prediction had lulled him into expecting that
Mind of a Champion
would receive at least a modest critical welcome.

But it had never come. There had been no further praise. There had not even been any further pans. His book had suffered the worst possible of fates: it was totally ignored.

“Bill, tell it to me straight,” he had demanded three months after publication, “is my book dead in the water?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Bill replied, “sales have been a little slower than we had hoped, but then the paperback is bound to reach a wider audience.”

Chaplin hesitated, hoping some felicitous, mollifying rhetoric
would pop into his head. But then he realized painfully that there was no evasion.

“Yes,” he said, “I’d say that rigor mortis has set in.”

Had the experts of the
Guide Michelin
dined at La Renaissance, in the heart of Saigon near the French Hospital, they would have surely given it three stars.

This at least was the opinion of Major Palmer Talbot, who dined there often—especially when he was anxious to impress a visiting government official or an important journalist.

(“Ironic isn’t it, Major, to find the best French restaurant in the world halfway ’round the globe from Paris. You would think that the war would cramp the chef’s style. You know, keep him from getting the ingredients.”

“I think the left-wing press likes to exaggerate the situation here just for the sake of selling papers. I mean, it’s clear we’ve got things fairly in control—which is, of course, what you’ve come to see. And I hope you’ve been convinced that it’s a matter of a few more months till we bring peace to this lovely, benighted land.”

“Well, frankly, I’m impressed. And I’ll share my impression with the boys on the Hill.”)

It has often been said that war is hell. Yet it is rarely admitted that for the privileged few war can be a hell of a good time.

Certainly Palmer Talbot’s tour of duty in Vietnam had thus far been enormously enjoyable. He had acquired the knowledge of Vietnamese not for the purpose of going out into remote villages to ask if Ho Chi Minh’s bullyboys were in the vicinity. Rather it was to help coordinate the actions of U.S. troops and their South Vietnamese colleagues by acting as liaison officer with their high commands.