Nothing Lasts Forever (6 page)

“Have you eaten the crab cakes at the Cypress Club…?”

“If you like good beef, try the House of Prime Rib over on Van Ness.”

And meanwhile, a nurse would be mopping up the patient’s blood and guts.

When they weren’t talking about food, the doctors talked about baseball or football scores.

“Did you see the 49ers play last Sunday? I bet they miss Joe Montana. He always came through for them in the last two minutes of a game.”

And out would come a ruptured appendix.

Kafka,
Paige thought.
Kafka would have loved this.

At three in the morning, when Paige was asleep in the on-call room, she was awakened by the telephone.

A raspy voice said, “Dr. Taylor—Room 419—a heart attack patient. You’ll have to hurry!” The line went dead.

Paige sat on the edge of the bed, fighting sleep, and stumbled to her feet.
You have to hurry!
She went into the corridor, but there was no time to wait for an elevator.
She rushed up the stairs and ran down the fourth-floor corridor to Room 419, her heart pounding. She flung open the door and stood there, staring.

Room 419 was a storage room.

Kat Hunter was making her rounds with Dr. Richard Hutton. He was in his forties, brusque and fast. He spent no more than two or three minutes with each patient, scanning their charts, then snapping out orders to the surgical residents in a machine-gun, staccato fashion.

“Check her hemoglobin and schedule surgery for tomorrow…”

“Keep a close eye on his temperature chart…”

“Cross-match four units of blood…”

“Remove these stitches…”

“Get some chest films…”

Kat and the other residents were busily making notes on everything, trying hard to keep up with him.

They approached a patient who had been in the hospital a week and had had a battery of tests for a high fever, with no results.

When they were out in the corridor, Kat asked, “What’s the matter with him?”

“It’s a GOK,” a resident said. “A God only knows. We’ve done X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, spinal taps, liver biopsy. Everything. We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

They moved into a ward where a young patient, his head bandaged after an operation, was sleeping. As Dr. Hutton started to unwrap the head dressing, the patient woke up, startled. “What…what’s going on?”

“Sit up,” Dr. Hutton said curtly. The young man was trembling.

I’ll never treat my patients that way,
Kat vowed.

The next patient was a healthy-looking man in his seventies. As soon as Dr. Hutton approached the bed, the patient yelled,
“Gonzo!
I’m going to sue you, you dirty son of a bitch.”

“Now, Mr. Sparolini…”

“Don’t Mr. Sparolini me! You turned me into a fucking eunuch.”

That’s an oxymoron,
Kat thought.

“Mr. Sparolini, you agreed to have the vasectomy, and—”

“It was my wife’s idea. Damn bitch! Just wait till I get home.”

They left him muttering to himself.

“What’s his problem?” one of the residents asked.

“His problem is that he’s a horny old goat. His young wife has six kids and she doesn’t want any more.”

The next patient was a little girl, ten years old. Dr. Hutton looked at her chart. “We’re going to give you a shot to make the bad bugs go away.”

A nurse filled a syringe and moved toward the little girl.

“No!” she screamed. “You’re going to hurt me!”

“This won’t hurt, baby,” the nurse assured her.

The words were a dark echo in Kat’s mind.

This won’t hurt, baby
…It was the voice of her stepfather whispering to her in the scary dark.

“This will feel good. Spread your legs. Come on, you little bitch!” And he had pushed her legs apart and forced his male hardness into her and put his hand over her
mouth to keep her from screaming with the pain. She was thirteen years old. After that night, his visits became a terrifying nightly ritual. “You’re lucky you got a man like me to teach you how to fuck,” he would tell her. “Do you know what a Kat is? A little pussy. And I want some.” And he would fall on top of her and grab her, and no amount of crying or pleading would make him stop.

Kat had never known her father. Her mother was a cleaning woman who worked nights at an office building near their tiny apartment in Gary, Indiana. Kat’s stepfather was a huge man who had been injured in an accident at a steel mill, and he stayed home most of the time, drinking. At night, when Kat’s mother left for work, he would go into Kat’s room. “You say anything to your mother or brother, and I’ll kill him,” he told Kat. J
can’t let him hurt Mike,
Kat thought. Her brother was five years younger than she, and Kat adored him. She mothered him and protected him and fought his battles for him. He was the only bright spot in Kat’s life.

One morning, terrified as Kat was by her stepfather’s threats, she decided she had to tell her mother what was happening. Her mother would put a stop to it, would protect her.

“Mama, your husband comes to my bed at night when you’re away, and forces himself on me.”

Her mother stared at her a moment, then slapped Kat hard across the face.

“Don’t you dare make up lies like that, you little slut!”

Kat never discussed it again. The only reason she stayed at home was because of Mike.
He’d be lost without me,
Kat thought. But the day she learned she was
pregnant, she ran away to live with an aunt in Minneapolis.

The day Kat ran away from home, her life completely changed.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” her Aunt Sophie had said. “But from now on, you’re going to stop running away. You know that song they sing on
Sesame Street
? ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’? Well, honey, it’s not easy being black, either. You have two choices. You can keep running and hiding and blaming the world for your problems, or you can stand up for yourself and decide to be somebody important.”

“How do I do that?”

“By
knowing
that you’re important. First, you get an image in your mind of who you want to be, child, and what you want to be. And then you go to work,
becoming
that person.”

I’m not going to have his baby,
Kat decided.
I want an abortion.

It was arranged quietly, during a weekend, and it was performed by a midwife who was a friend of Kat’s aunt. When it was over, Kat thought fiercely,
I’m never going to let a man touch me again. Never!

Minneapolis was a fairyland for Kat. Within a few blocks of almost every home were lakes and streams and rivers. And there were over eight thousand acres of landscaped parks. She went sailing on the city lakes and took boat rides on the Mississippi.

She visited the Great Zoo with Aunt Sophie and spent
Sundays at the Valleyfair Amusement Park. She went on the hay rides at Cedar Creek Farm, and watched knights in armor jousting at the Shakopee Renaissance Festival.

Aunt Sophie watched Kat and thought,
The girl has never had a childhood.

Kat was learning to enjoy herself, but Aunt Sophie sensed that deep inside her niece was a place that no one could reach, a barrier she had set up to keep her from being hurt again.

She made friends at school. But never with boys. Her girlfriends were all dating, but Kat was a loner, and too proud to tell anyone why. She looked up to her aunt, whom she loved very much.

Kat had taken little interest in school, or in reading books, but Aunt Sophie changed all that. Her home was filled with books, and Sophie’s excitement about them was contagious.

“There are wonderful worlds in there,” she told the young girl. “Read, and you’ll learn where you came from and where you’re going. I’ve got a feeling that you’re going to be famous one day, baby. But you have to get an education first. This is America. You can become anybody you want to be. You may be black and poor, but so were some of our congresswomen, and movie stars, and scientists, and sports legends. One day we’re going to have a black president. You can be anything you want to be. It’s up to you.”

It was the beginning.

Kat became the top student in her class. She was an avid reader. In the school library one day, she happened to pick up a copy of Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith,
and she was fascinated by the story of the dedicated young doctor.
She read Agnes Cooper’s
Promises to Keep,
and
Woman Surgeon
by Dr. Else Roe, and it opened up a whole new world for Kat. She discovered that there were people on this earth who devoted themselves to helping others, to saving lives. When Kat came home from school one day, she said to Aunt Sophie, “I’m going to be a doctor. A famous one.”

On
Monday morning, three of Paige’s patients’ charts were missing, and Paige was blamed.

On Wednesday, Paige was awakened at 4:00
A.M.
in the on-call room. Sleepily, she picked up the telephone. “Dr. Taylor.”

Silence.

“Hello…hello.”

She could hear breathing at the other end of the line. And then there was a click.

Paige lay awake for the rest of the night.

In the morning, Paige said to Kat, “I’m either becoming paranoid or someone hates me.” She told Kat what had happened.

“Patients sometimes get grudges against doctors,” Kat said. “Can you think of anyone who…?”

Paige sighed. “Dozens.”

“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

Paige wished that she could believe it.

In the late summer, the magic telegram arrived. It was waiting for Paige when she returned to the apartment late at night. It read: “Arriving San Francisco noon Sunday. Can’t wait to see you. Love, Alfred.”

He was finally on his way back to her! Paige read the telegram again and again, her excitement growing each time.
Alfred!
His name conjured up a tumbling kaleidoscope of exciting memories…

Paige and Alfred had grown up together. Their fathers were part of a medical cadre of WHO that traveled to Third World countries, fighting exotic and virulent diseases. Paige and her mother accompanied Dr. Taylor, who headed the team.

Paige and Alfred had had a fantasy childhood. In India, Paige learned to speak Hindi. At the age of two, she knew that the name for the bamboo hut they lived in was
basha.
Her father was
gorasahib,
a white man, and she was
nani,
a little sister. They addressed Paige’s father as
abadhan,
the leader, or
baba,
father.

When Paige’s parents were not around, she drank
bhanga,
an intoxicating drink made with hashish leaves, and ate
chapati
with
ghi.

And then they were on their way to Africa. Off to another adventure!

Paige and Alfred became used to swimming and bathing in rivers that had crocodiles and hippopotamuses. Their pets were baby zebras and cheetahs and snakes. They grew up in windowless round huts made of wattle and daub, with packed dirt floors and conical thatched roofs.
Someday,
Paige vowed to herself,
I’m going
to live in a real house, a beautiful cottage with a green lawn and a white picket fence.

To the doctors and nurses, it was a difficult, frustrating life. But to the two children, it was a constant adventure, living in the land of lions, giraffes, and elephants. They went to primitive cinder-block schoolhouses, and when none was available, they had tutors.

Paige was a bright child, and her mind was a sponge, absorbing everything. Alfred adored her.

“I’m going to marry you one day, Paige,” he said when she was twelve, he fourteen.

“I’m going to marry you, too, Alfred.”

They were two serious children, determined to spend the rest of their lives together.

The doctors from WHO were selfless, dedicated men and women who devoted their lives to their work. They often worked under nearly impossible circumstances. In Africa, they had to compete with
wogesha
—the native medical practitioners whose primitive remedies were passed on from father to son, and often had deadly effects. The Masai’s traditional remedy for flesh wounds was
olkilorite,
a mixture of cattle blood, raw meat, and essence of a mysterious root.

The Kikuyu remedy for smallpox was to have children drive out the sickness with sticks.

“You must stop that,” Dr. Taylor would tell them. “It doesn’t help.”

“Better than having you stick sharp needles in our skin,” they would reply.

The dispensaries were tables lined up under the trees, for surgery. The doctors saw hundreds of patients a day, and there was always a long line waiting to see them—lepers, natives with tubercular lungs, whooping cough, smallpox, dysentery.

Paige and Alfred were inseparable. As they grew older, they would walk to the market together, to a village miles away. And they would talk about their plans for the future.

Medicine was a part of Paige’s early life. She learned to care for patients, to give shots and dispense medications, and she anticipated ways to help her father.

Paige loved her father. Curt Taylor was the most caring, selfless man she had ever known. He genuinely liked people, dedicating his life to helping those who needed him, and he instilled that passion in Paige. In spite of the long hours he worked, he managed to find time to spend with his daughter. He made the discomfort of the primitive places they lived in fun.

Paige’s relationship with her mother was something else. Her mother was a beauty from a wealthy social background. Her cool aloofness kept Paige at a distance. Marrying a doctor who was going to work in far-off exotic places had seemed romantic to her, but the harsh reality had embittered her. She was not a warm, loving woman, and she seemed to Paige always to be complaining.

“Why did we ever have to come to this godforsaken place, Curt?”

“The people here live like animals. We’re going to catch some of their awful diseases.”

“Why can’t you practice medicine in the United States and make money like other doctors?”

And on and on it went.

The more her mother criticized him, the more Paige adored her father.

When Paige was fifteen years old, her mother disappeared with the owner of a large cocoa plantation in Brazil.

“She’s not coming back, is she?” Paige asked.

“No, darling. I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad!” She had not meant to say that. She was hurt that her mother had cared so little for her and her father that she had abandoned them.

The experience made Paige draw even closer to Alfred Turner. They played games together and went on expeditions together, and shared their dreams.

“I’m going to be a doctor, too, when I grow up,” Alfred confided. “We’ll get married, and we’ll work together.”

“And we’ll have lots of children!”

“Sure. If you like.”

On the night of Paige’s sixteenth birthday, their lifelong emotional intimacy exploded into a new dimension. At a little village in East Africa, the doctors had been called away on an emergency, because of an epidemic, and Paige, Alfred, and a cook were the only ones left in camp.

They had had dinner and gone to bed. But in the middle of the night Paige had been awakened in her tent by the faraway thunder of stampeding animals. She lay there, and as the minutes went by and the sound of the stampede came closer, she began to grow afraid. Her breath quickened. There was no telling when her father and the others would return.

She got up. Alfred’s tent was only a few feet away. Terrified, Paige got up, raised the flap of the tent, and ran to Alfred’s tent.

He was asleep.

“Alfred!”

He sat up, instantly awake. “Paige? Is anything wrong?”

“I’m frightened. Could I get into bed with you for a while?”

“Sure.” They lay there, listening to the animals charging through the brush.

In a few minutes, the sounds began to die away.

Alfred became conscious of Paige’s warm body lying next to him.

“Paige, I think you’d better go back to your tent.”

Paige could feel his male hardness pressing against her.

All the physical needs that had been building up within them came boiling to the surface.

“Alfred.”

“Yes?” His voice was husky.

“We’re getting married, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s all right.”

And the sounds of the jungle around them disappeared, and they began to explore and discover a world no one had ever possessed but themselves. They were the first lovers in the world, and they gloried in the wonderful miracle of it.

At dawn, Paige crept back to her tent and she thought, happily,
I’m a woman now.

From time to time, Curt Taylor suggested to Paige that she return to the United States to live with his brother in his beautiful home in Deerfield, north of Chicago.

“Why?” Paige would ask.

“So that you can grow up to be a proper young lady.”

“I
am
a proper young lady.”

“Proper young ladies don’t tease wild monkeys and try to ride baby zebras.”

Her answer was always the same. “I won’t leave you.”

When Paige was seventeen, the WHO team went to a jungle village in South Africa to fight a typhoid epidemic. Making the situation even more perilous was the fact that shortly after the doctors arrived, war broke out between two local tribes. Curt Taylor was warned to leave.

“I can’t, for God’s sake. I have patients who will die if I desert them.”

Four days later, the village came under attack. Paige and her father huddled in their little hut, listening to the yelling and the sounds of gunfire outside.

Paige was terrified. “They’re going to kill us!”

Her father had taken her in his arms. “They won’t harm us, darling. We’re here to help them. They know we’re their friends.”

And he had been right.

The chief of one of the tribes had burst into the hut with some of his warriors. “Do not worry. We guard you.” And they had.

The fighting and shooting finally stopped, but in the morning Curt Taylor made a decision.

He sent a message to his brother.
Sending Paige out on next plane. Will wire details. Please meet her at airport.

Paige was furious when she heard the news. She was taken, sobbing wildly, to the dusty little airport where a Piper Cub was waiting to fly her to a town where she could catch a plane to Johannesburg.

“You’re sending me away because you want to get rid of me!” she cried.

Her father held her close in his arms. “I love you more than anything in the world, baby. I’ll miss you every minute.
But I’ll be going back to the States soon, and we’ll be together again.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Alfred was there to see Paige off.

“Don’t worry,” Alfred told Paige. “I’ll come and get you as soon as I can. Will you wait for me?”

It was a pretty silly question, after all those years.

“Of course I will.”

Three days later, when Paige’s plane arrived at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Paige’s Uncle Richard was there to greet her. Paige had never met him. All she knew about him was that he was a very wealthy businessman whose wife had died several years earlier. “He’s the successful one in the family,” Paige’s father always said.

Paige’s uncle’s first words stunned her. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Paige, but I just received word that your father was killed in a native uprising.”

Her whole world had been shattered in an instant. The ache was so strong that she did not think she could bear it.
I won’t let my uncle see me cry,
Paige vowed.
I won’t. I never should have left. I’m going back there.

Driving from the airport, Paige stared out the window, looking at the heavy traffic.

“I hate Chicago.”

“Why, Paige?”

“It’s a jungle.”

Richard would not permit Paige to return to Africa for her father’s funeral, and that infuriated her.

He tried to reason with her. “Paige, they’ve already
buried your father. There’s no point in your going back.”

But there was a point:
Alfred was there.

A few days after Paige arrived, her uncle sat down with her to discuss her future.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Paige informed him. “I’m going to be a doctor.”

At twenty-one, when Paige finished college, she applied to ten medical schools and was accepted by all of them. She chose a school in Boston.

It took two days to reach Alfred by telephone in Zaire, where he was working part-time with a WHO unit.

When Paige told him the news, he said, “That’s wonderful, darling. I’m nearly finished with my medical courses. I’ll stay with WHO for a while, but in a few years we’ll be practicing together.”

Together.
The magical word.

“Paige, I’m desperate to see you. If I can get out for a few days, could you meet me in Hawaii?”

There wasn’t the slightest hesitation. “Yes.”

And they had both managed it. Later, Paige could only imagine how difficult it must have been for Alfred to make the long journey, but he never mentioned it.

They spent three incredible days at a small hotel in Hawaii, called Sunny Cove, and it was as though they had never been apart. Paige wanted so much to ask Alfred to go back to Boston with her, but she knew how selfish that would have been. The work that he was doing was far more important.

On their last day together, as they were getting dressed, Paige asked, “Where will they be sending you, Alfred?”

“Gambia, or maybe Bangladesh.”

To save lives, to help those who so desperately need him.
She held him tightly and closed her eyes. She never wanted to let him go.

As though reading her thoughts, he said, “I’ll never let you get away.”

Paige started medical school, and she and Alfred corresponded regularly. No matter in what part of the world he was, Alfred managed to telephone Paige on her birthday and at Christmas. Just before New Year’s Eve, when Paige was in her second year of school, Alfred telephoned.

“Paige?”

“Darling! Where are you?”

“I’m in Senegal. I figured out it’s only eighty-eight hundred miles from the Sunny Cove hotel.”

It took a minute for it to sink in.

“Do you mean…?”

“Can you meet me in Hawaii for New Year’s Eve?”

“Oh, yes! Yes!”

Alfred traveled nearly halfway around the world to meet her, and this time the magic was even stronger. Time had stood still for both of them.

“Next year I’ll be in charge of my own cadre at WHO,” Alfred said. “When you finish school, I want us to get married…”

They were able to get together once more, and when they weren’t able to meet, their letters spanned time and space.

All those years he had worked as a doctor in Third World countries, like his father and Paige’s father, doing the wonderful work that they did. And no, at last, he was coming home to her.