Dog Tags (27 page)

He wondered if Nan was happy. Or even alive.

He wondered if Prpl had married.

He wondered if Lin had found a home.

He thought of a woman named A—and a woman named B—and a woman named C—, and he mocked himself. He remembered a girl named Irene. He remembered Union Square on winter nights. “I never really knew a woman in my life,” he said aloud. “A pig and a fascist, I am.” Too late now to map his heart, bluffs and streams and eroded hills, and the one grand canyon. What's past is prologue! Prosperity is just around the corner!

He stripped and showered, very hot, very cold, and thought of long drinks, dark rum and water, and the white sailboat. Perhaps. Perhaps now was the time. He could do it; he had the money. But that spoiled it, having the money. Sailing off in his dhow-Jones. No no. Still a child. Crew of four, round maidens, comely, skilled and grateful. He remembered a woman with bright red cheeks in a padded, bulky blue suit. He remembered Ewald. And Parsons. Life had rewarded him to that extent: never again the merest hint of Parsons. Parsons would arrive tonight and arrest him for double-parking.

He dried on a fluffy towel longer than himself, and dressed. Champagne tonight. Romance. Phony male stuff. Did liberated women shriek and bellow at the little death? Did they tip a quarter? Everybody liberated into equality. Like to be liberated out of it. Like to be special again. Corporal. Whoa. Very special in Korea. Can't have that again.

His work at least had gone well. Bartholomew rested, advised, shifted the load. “Damn new medicines come too fast,” he'd growled. “Old Finlay has a shelf full of antibiotics worth about five thousand, and they're half of them obsolete. Damn detail men come in every week with some new miracle, soothes the breast, calms the bowels, makes childbirth a pleasure. You, sir. Large bottle? One thin dime.”

Benny reported that one of the countless Westerdonck wives had produced her ninth, a boy, healthy and normal in all respects. “I'm just too tired at night to keep that man off,” she said. Briefly Benny envied him. She had heard that tubes could be tied off. Enough was enough. She was thirty-three “and not even Catholic.” Bartholomew groaned. “I once loved humanity. But I went into practice in nineteen oh four.” Benny was uneasy; within him too a small executioner resided, and stirred now: massacres, seas of blood, cities destroyed, later a manageable world. But the survivors would be Westerdoncks. He suffered a premature nostalgia for vast bays, broad western uplands. “We can advise her to do it,” Bartholomew said, “and maybe even talk that horny husband around. We're all doomed, boy. They're putting up those cardboard-and-horseshit houses over on Turtle Lake, and a little electronics factory. More damn women in bullfighters' pants and men's haircuts. More damn bowling alleys. Chewing gum. And those god damn plastic curlers in public places. I tell you, these politicians ought to have their brains in a bottle at Harvard.”

“Chewing gum,” Benny said. “I always think of tired girls on buses and subways.” A light ache, the merest throb.

“Don't know what got into me,” Bartholomew apologized. He started a cigarette, and blew smoke darker than his hair. “Getting old. Pay no attention. Keep the faith.”

“Never thought of myself as a man of faith,” Benny said.

“You'll lose it,” the old doctor said.

But he lost Bartholomew. The old man died, not quickly as he had wished but over several days, a general but unhurried vascular collapse. Benny tried but could not see it as the death of a man; Bartholomew had lived almost ninety years and had earned his rest. Instead Benny saw it as his own loss: another era, country, limb detached from him and restored to eternity. “They” had taken the old man away from him. The surviving doctors insisted on every technical refinement, and long after Bartholomew had lapsed into coma they were feeding him, cleaning him, plugging him in, monitoring awesome machinery; the dying man was like a spaceship, with fuel and arithmetic and little red lights and telemetry. Benny kept remembering a line from some protocol—religious, medical, perhaps the Pope, he could not recall—but the line, yes, pure poetry: “There is no obligation to use extraordinary means to keep the person alive.” He wanted to shout it; he said it quietly instead, and earned scowls.

He went to the old man's house and found suits, shirts, shoes, a large stamp collection, many books, most of them history; on the walls reproductions of Constable and the rural Dutchmen. He sat in a plump armchair and married himself to the silence, tried to be Bartholomew, and for a moment succeeded. He sensed in himself much of the old man's grudging and sullen rectitude, and was pleased; also a cheerful pessimism. He remembered the silvery hair and the sea-blue eyes as if he had lost a lovely woman. Then the housekeeper arrived weeping and evicted him, so he returned to the hospital.

Bartholomew had not come to, and Benny knew he never would. Later they found that he had left everything to a niece in Vermont, and had explicitly ordered that his body be defended from quacks and haruspices and bound over to the nearest Episcopal church, the higher the better, for decent burial. Benny emitted one bawl of absolute mirth, earning more scowls. Even at the funeral he suppressed loony laughter, as if only he knew that Bartholomew was not really dead, just Sisyphus taking a little time out for that restful walk back down the hill. A week later he wept, like the heroine of some Scotch romance, wept as if his heart would break, yes, because he had lost a friend and he was lonely.

19

His automobile, he decided, was contemptible and malevolent: he must be a whoreson buggy doctor. He almost smiled. He was tired of the shuttle, the one road, toing and froing past the innumerable milestones of his own rut. He remembered earlier days, he and his buggy spanking new and the morning itself of breeze and brass, Benny avid, diamond-eyed, gleeful and catchy, making his rounds, saving lives and the surf roaring … Yes, we were all young once and sang aloud. Now he drove through whiffs of petroleum, cigarette smoke and stale sweat, riding sullen between ribbons of road-house and restroom, no Irish princesses to do him homage. Just once. Once before he died he would like to see that. Principally brunettes. Only for remembrance, nothing personal, you understand, an anecdote for my grandsons.

He entered the hospital and found himself smiling at strangers, who made way with the utmost deference; he tried to look grave, sagacious and respectable.

No change. None of his pint-sized charges had swallowed a thermometer or savaged a nurse. None had died, not even Baby Roland, who lay comatose and untroubled. A rare moment of peace: at the nurses' station no bustle, no clatter, painters, plumbers or janitors; only the occasional pad of a ripple-sole, or a lost visitor doing his righteous best.

“Management summons me,” Benny boasted.

“Ah so,” Grentzer rejoiced. “Remember: up against the wall. We shall overcome.”

“My God, I forgot about Rosalie. How is she?”

“Checked out.”

“I don't believe it,” Benny said.

Grentzer shrugged.

“Citizen Grentzer,” Benny said, “it becomes more and more difficult to love the common people.”

“The baby has brown eyes,” Grentzer went on, “or
a
brown eye. Notice that?”

Benny said, “Bobby, today's my birthday. Do me a favor and stick to fruit flies.”

Grentzer laughed. “Many happy returns. How old?”

“Forty-six and fading fast.”

“Old Doc Beer. I hear you're going to run for mayor.”

“Gruff, kindly old Doc Beer, chuckling merrily at gleets and buboes. Who's on tonight?”

“Dembo and Hines.”

“Good. Good. There isn't a damn thing I can do, is there?”

“Nothing.”

“Then I can go home and enjoy my birthday.”

“Absolutely.”

“And the baby won't ever know that nobody cared.”

“Never.”

“Terrific,” Benny said.

He strode the wide corridors like a ghoul, Flying Dutchman, Wandering Jew. Behind every door a malfunction mocked him, a clot or lost limb, tumors, bloats. Sobs. Radios. Orderlies, interns, nurses, housekeepers, like floorwalkers and salesladies. The team, as Taubeneck said while underpaying all. Benny had intended a quiet private practice, occasional visits to the local pesthouse, pomander ball well in hand; he had been tricked, edged, elbowed and betrayed, euchred by history and politics: medicine was hospitals now. A bright expensive machine for every cheap dull ailment. Here at the end of the corridor, a solarium, standard irony on a day like this, and a couple of tables, cards and checkers, forlorn plants. The panes were streaked; beyond, gloom and cloud. A woman wept. He hesitated. Rosalie? He peered cautiously within. Mrs. Diehl. The melancholy Mrs. Diehl. She glanced up; he smiled. “Is anything wrong?”

“Oh no.” In her forties, frumpish and silent, short curly brown hair and insufficient chin, she endured in sempiternal depression. Her commitment papers, complete, lay on McCook's desk. “My medicine,” she said.

“Oh? Are they late with it?”

“I mean will they let me have my medicine in the other place?”

“Of course,” Benny said.

“I'm running out,” she whimpered.

“I'll tell the doctor.”

“No. I mean my own.” Tears welled.

Benny sighed, sat beside her and patted her hand. “Spring's coming. You'll cheer up.” They shared a flaking trailer on the shore of a large lake. It was one of many hundreds of flaking trailers, occupied by retired couples, mainly Baptist and overweight. Mrs. Diehl gathered wild onions while Benny, in dirty khakis and a tank-top, smoked a nickel cigar and fished from the bank. The fish he caught were diseased, coated with sludge, trapped in plastic loops or used contraceptives; they seemed stone-eyed and prehistoric and could not be eaten. But Mrs. Diehl smiled, and gathered wild onions, and cooked stews, and adored Benny. No one else in all her life had let her be.

“Oh yes.” She strained at a smile. “It's just my hands. Without the medicine I hurt all day. I can hardly pick things up, or play solitaire.”

She was not his patient, and he recalled nothing of this. “What kind of medicine is it?”

“Pills. White pills.”

“What's it called?”

“It's cortisone. You know cortisone.”

“Yes, I know. How long have you been taking it?”

“About a year. I don't know what I'd do without it.”

Benny patted her hand again. “Don't you worry,” he said. “I'll see about it.”

“You're a gentleman,” she said.

“I'll stop in later,” he said. How many times had he said that? Five times a day, or ten, for fifteen years. As needed for chronic fear and acute disillusion. “You take it easy and don't worry.”

She smiled, a tear-stained mask. Benny rose. There but for the grace of God went a human being.

At his knock and entrance they said “Ah.” Smiles bloomed, papers seemed to skitter, they stared like the Syndics. Benny nodded; Taubeneck, chipper, indicated a chair and said, “Tea, Marcia, if you will.” Marcia Hargum, president of the garden club, whose husband raised Brown Swiss, offered a silvery smile and darted up. Benny sat between Finlay the pharmacist and Runge the oil dealer, Finlay thin, gray and dapper, Runge balding and rumpled. Mrs. Lacey winked; her late husband had been mayor and real estate. Drs. Bolden, Thilmany and Lindahl sat glum. Cassini the bank manager, young and groomed, strove for dignity.

Taubeneck was a lawyer, a large man and bluff, with hairy ears; toward Benny he affected the plain blunt camaraderie of aging warriors—intended also, Benny knew, to convey righteous fraternity, all races, religions and blood types. Benny visualized him at the country club: “That Beer is a Jew and a fighting man.” These directors were of all shapes, and they all had money. When Benny stepped into this ducal room—oak and leather, deep armchairs, an ostentatiously simple conference table, oil paintings by local landscapists, the colonial tea service—he thought of cash. Sometimes he even saw it: fat piles of green bills, chamois bags bulging, louis d'or, a litter of finely engraved securities.

“Well,” Taubeneck began, “we've got our hands full this time.” Benny did not answer; he accepted tea. “A bad business,” Cassini said. “A disgrace,” Bolden said. They waited.

“You own a share of Finlay's store,” Benny said, or wanted to say, to Thilmany, “which is highly unethical and maybe illegal.” Outside he saw hills, houses, moving vehicles, the drab setting of a rainy afternoon.

“The disgrace is here,” he said, “and not out there. Any one of us spends more in a day than they make in a week.”

“Good old Ben,” Taubeneck murmured.

“You know how I feel,” Benny said.

“That's not the point, comparing like that,” Finlay said.

“I'm just a witness,” Benny said. “I have no vote.”

“Well now,” Taubeneck said, “
that's
not the point. The point is, we've got to keep this hospital running, and make them see reason.”

“The working conditions are admirable,” Mrs. Hargum reported. “They have a cafeteria.”

“This is a private hospital,” Lindahl said sourly. “We don't have all the money in the world.”

“We have the glaucoma clinic for children,” Cassini said.

“And therapeutic abortions for rich ladies,” Benny said, or wanted to say. And tea and cookies at board meetings.

“Back to the point,” Taubeneck insisted. “We all know the hospital's history, and the good work we've done. Question is, what do we do right now about this particular problem. Benny?”

“Give them what they ask. It's not unreasonable.”

“We can't,” Lindahl said. “Can't give in just like that. They'll come back for more.”

Marian Lacey said that there was a question of principle. She was pleasingly plump, prematurely white-haired, surely corseted. Benny's tea was hot, tasty and invigorating. Taubeneck reminded them that the hospital was run at a profit. Droplets of mist condensed on the shiny panes. Thilmany spoke of a costly computer. Benny drew forth a leather cigar-case and extracted a breva. “Your permission,” he asked the ladies. They nodded. He clipped the cigar while Finlay spoke of health insurance and communism. The cigar was as rich as chocolate; Benny saw a finca on the Cabo de Viñales, all green and gleaming brown in the Cuban sun, his ketch lying offshore. Nan sipped red wine. He thought it was Nan; her face swam and shimmered, out of focus.