Private Practices (19 page)

Ben stared at his unsteady fingers and a feeling of dread swept over him. “I've never known you to go through like that,” he commented.

Sidney said, “I never did before. But everyone else does it all the time.”

Sidney was right, Ben thought. But he'd also seemed unaware of the fact that his scalpel hadn't merely slipped but had been quivering in an unsteady grip. “We'll put her on a soft diet,” he went on, hardly contrite or concerned, or even aware that Ben was staring at his hands. “She'll end up good as new,” he repeated.

The patient had been given her newborn to hold on her stomach and, the lower part of her body numbed, was smiling beatifically at the baby. She was unaware of the torn, ragged flesh between her vagina and her rectum, but the nurse who was assisting Sidney, the lower part of her face masked, had narrowed accusatory eyes.

A few moments later Ben told Sidney he had to leave. He couldn't remain. He had seen something which he found enormously alarming. Sidney's hands had been as shaky as ever his own had been when he was taking drugs. Worse, Sidney's thinking had been quite peculiar. His response to his error had been shallow, and he hadn't even worried that his shakiness might be observed.

Could Sidney have been high, he wondered as he left the delivery room. But a second later, discarding his cap and mask in the giant wastebasket outside the swinging doors, he scoffed at the idea. He had always suspected Sidney of occasionally taking small quantities of amphetamines or barbiturates. And he had himself first learned to use them during his medical school crises as a result of Sidney's suggesting them. But his brother had always been highly critical of any doctor who relied on stimulants or sedatives to excess.

Still, Sidney
had
seemed drugged and not just mildly so, he had to admit to himself as he entered the changing room. He had seemed exceedingly cut off both from what he was doing and from what others might be thinking. It was a phenomenon he remembered well. Sitting down on the edge of a cot, he reviewed Sidney's disconnectedness in the delivery room and, simultaneously, his erratic behavior in the office over the past few weeks. The more he thought, the more he favored his theory.

It made considerable sense. Distressed over the imminent exposure of his research, Sidney was behaving exactly as he himself had behaved when confronted with feelings of failure. He was drugging himself. But was it really possible? Perhaps he ought to try the theory out on someone else.

It would have to be someone he could trust. Someone who wouldn't, if he turned out to be wrong, say anything against him to Sidney. Abruptly, he got to his feet and left the changing room, hurrying toward the covered ramp that connected the main building of the hospital with the Alanson Wing, the neurological annex in which Mulenberg was still confined.

“Hi there. How's it going?” A nurse was standing in the corner of Mulenberg's big room, arranging one of the dozens of bouquets of flowers that arrived from former patients and professional acquaintances daily. Ben nodded to her and sat down in the visitor's chair alongside the bed.

The old man's face looked as white as the crumpled pillow beneath his head. His condition had not improved since his last stroke, although the hospital had done all it could for him. Now there was nothing further to be done and plans were being made to send him to a nursing home unless his wife, from whom he had separated the previous winter, agreed to care for him.

The care would be strictly custodial. He would either recover his speech or he would not; he would either be subject to another massive stroke or he would not. Those who visited him, including Ben who had come on several occasions, always left his room shaking their heads. But in Mulenberg's presence they pretended to a brisk cheerfulness. Ben attempted it.

Waiting for the nurse to finish her flower arrangement, he began telling Mulenberg hospital gossip. Herron was leaving to affiliate exclusively with Midstate next year; Arnie Diehl was getting married; Alithorn was trying to talk his new wife into quitting medical school. Whenever he finished communicating a tidbit of information, Mulenberg raised his eyebrows and blinked his eyes several times, suggesting that he had understood.

The nurse, her arms stuffed with green tissue paper, let herself quietly out of the door.

As soon as it closed, Ben looked cautiously at Mulenberg's locked, slightly scowling lips and said, “Sidney's pill is no good. He's suspected it for a while, but now he's sure of it.”

Mulenberg's lips remained fixed but his eyelashes danced.

“It's worrying him badly,” Ben went on, lowering his voice a fraction. “I think he's on drugs. Barbiturates. He hasn't said anything, of course. But it looks to me as if he's got all the signs. Trembling. Excitability. Paranoia. Loss of judgment.”

Mulenberg made a harsh gutteral sound in his throat and for a moment Ben thought nervously that perhaps he shouldn't go on. But when the old man's lips remained as frozen as they had been before, he decided to continue. Mulenberg certainly couldn't, at least at present, repeat confidences. Perhaps he would never be able to. Besides, his eyelids were opening and closing repetitively as if to encourage greater communication. Ben began talking again, words coming more easily now, sentences forming on his lips before he even had time to consider them fully.

“I really love Sidney, you know,” he began. “He's a remarkable person. And he's more than a brother to me. Our father died when I was very young and in a way Sidney's been the only father I've ever known. A mentor. A role model. I respect him tremendously. But at the same time, he can be a stubborn son of a bitch.”

Pausing for breath, he was aware that he had never before allowed himself to speak disloyally of Sidney or to reflect aloud on any of his failings. Even as a child he had kept silent. Staring at Mulenberg, he remembered a game of Monopoly he and Sidney had once played with two older boys who had lived across the street from them when they were children. An hour into the game, Sidney, the banker, had pilfered a handful of peanut-butter-colored hundred dollar notes and slipped them under Ben's cushion, smiling slyly. A moment later he had shouted, “Someone here is cheating. Admit it! Admit it!” Ben had shivered and one of the boys from across the street had grabbed and searched both him and his chair until the notes cascaded down and then the three of them had held him and, tickling and pinching, begun to pummel him. He had cried and they had laughed. And Sidney had laughed the hardest. But he had never once defended himself sure that if he did, Sidney would invoke the punishment Ben had always found the worst, the refusal to speak to him for an entire day and night.

Suddenly, he leaned forward and spoke more loudly. “Sidney's so fucking sure of himself all the time.”

He was rambling, but he drew comfort from the fact that Mulenberg still seemed to be agreeing with him, his eyelids as expressive as a nodding head. He looked down at him fondly and hoped that the nurse would stay away a long time. He felt he had a hundred things to say, and with a luxurious sigh he began unburdening himself further, continuing to speak rapidly and without any of his usual guardedness. “I had a drug problem myself for a while,” he confessed. “But I was careful. I never went above tolerance. I think Sidney's taking a lot. And if he is, it isn't going to be easy to get him to stop. He's so pigheaded.” Crossing his legs, he sat up straight, thoroughly enjoying himself. But just as he opened his mouth to speak again, he heard a door opening. Startled, he turned and saw the nurse he had seen before, her arms filled with flowers.

He was bitterly disappointed and his shoulders slumped into their usual stoop. He had only just begun to express himself, only just begun to find the thoughts he wanted to explore. But he couldn't talk in front of the nurse. Standing up, he glanced again at Mulenberg, and thought that he too looked disappointed. “Well, most likely what I told you about Sid isn't even true. Most likely it's just my imagination.” Mulenberg's eyelashes continued to signal to him as if he understood not only his monologue but his reasons for curtailing it.

The nurse came up to the bed and began straightening the coverlet on which Mulenberg's paralyzed hands lay immobile. “Isn't it incredible the way he understands everything?” she said. “I mean
everything
.”

Ben nodded and, leaning over, patted one of Mulenberg's short-circuited hands. “We'll talk more,” he said appreciatively. “I'll come back and speak with you if I find anything out for sure.”

Mulenberg died two days later, before Ben had a chance to confirm or discard his suspicions about Sidney, and he felt surprisingly desolate. He had hoped to have another opportunity to talk with Mulenberg about his brother. When Marilyn Mulenberg called to inform him of the funeral arrangements, he promised at once to attend.

“Wonderful. See you there,” Marilyn said cheerfully, as if she had just obtained his agreement to attend a party.

Listening to her, he puzzled over her attitude. She had cursed Mulenberg when, shortly after his first stroke, he had separated from her. She had called his departure an aberration, a madness, the late-life psychological crisis of a man who, experiencing his first intensely personal brush with sickness and mortality, had romantically believed he could still seize the day and live out youthful fantasies of solitude and lack of attachment. Later, once her anger had worn thin, she had become depressed and refused to go out of her house or communicate with any of the friends who had once been hers and Harry's in common. But now that Harry was dead, she was suddenly sociable. “It's going to be a huge affair,” she was saying. “So be on time if you don't want to stand.”

On the day of the funeral, Naomi, looking trim in a navy blue suit, was waiting for Ben in front of the funeral parlor when his taxi pulled up. Although she had never met Mulenberg, Ben had asked her to come to his services anyway. More and more, he had been trying to include her in his life, and while he had never risked having her to dinner at Sidney and Claudia's, knowing that Naomi and Sidney were mutually hostile, he had taken Naomi to one of Herron's cocktail parties where he had introduced her to several of his colleagues and once he had even gone to dinner with her at Sam Schwartz's house. The funeral had seemed to him a particularly good event at which to include Naomi. All his associates would be there, and they would see that at last he had learned to live as they did, in pairs, and could no longer be considered an isolate.

“Nearly everyone's gone in already,” Naomi complained as he hurriedly paid his fare.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “I knew I was late but not this late.” He had been delayed by Sidney who had decided that he wouldn't attend the funeral only moments before Ben stopped by his office to pick him up. He had spent ten minutes trying to persuade Sidney to change his mind, but it had been to no avail.

“I never got on with Mulenberg when he was alive,” Sidney had declared sharply. “So I've decided not to go. Why should I pretend to have been his friend? Why does death have to make everyone so sentimental?”

He had found Sidney harsh and yet, as always, been impressed by his resolute lack of concern for convention. If Sidney was taking barbiturates, they certainly weren't altering the independence and nonconformity that had always marked his attitudes.

He mentioned none of this to Naomi, but simply grabbed her arm and hurried inside to take the elevator to the chapel floor. Something kept preventing him from telling Naomi his suspicions about Sidney. It was the fact that she was already so unqualifiedly negative about him, he thought as they boarded the elevator. She was still angry with Sidney for the way he had spoken to her the day she had come for the IUD, and she was outraged by the fact that he hadn't yet done anything about the potential dangers of his pill. If now Ben were to tell her that he believed Sidney was deadening his judgment with barbiturates, she would simply use the information as further ammunition in her nagging efforts to persuade him to pull away from Sidney. To set up a practice of his own.

Upstairs, the chapel doors were still open; the service had not yet begun. He was relieved to see that there were quite a few latecomers like himself still crowding the entranceway to the chapel and trying to make their way inside. He slowed his pace and waited for Naomi, who was trailing a few steps behind him, attempting to remove her suit jacket while still in motion. She had gotten her arm caught in the lining. He paused to help her free it. Then he looked at her, dismayed. Underneath her jacket she was wearing her violet silk shirt.

“Couldn't you have worn something more subdued?” he grumbled disagreeably.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Naomi said, chagrined. “I was late for work this morning and I had to get dressed so fast it slipped my mind that we were going to the funeral.” She looked up at him worriedly. “Is it terrible? Here, let me put my jacket back on.”

“No,” he said, affected by the rush of her apology. “No. You'll be too warm. Forget it. It's okay.” But when he led her into the chapel, he walked ever so slightly in front of her.

It was jammed. Most of the seats in the blond wood pews were filled and there was a great crowd standing in the back of the heavily curtained room. He saw Claudia among the standees, talking quietly with Alithorn and his newest wife, a statuesque young woman. Claudia looked exquisite.

She had gained very little weight. Her pregnancy was cunningly disguised, apparent chiefly in the attractive swell of her breasts against the soft, dark crepe of the loose dress she was wearing. It had always been one of his favorites. Sidney had gotten it for her at Halston's for her thirtieth birthday. He wished again that Naomi had dressed more appropriately, if not more fashionably, and then led her over to meet his sister-in-law. He had mentioned each woman to the other, and both had been saying for weeks how much they wanted to meet.