Random Winds (26 page)

“We don’t have yardsticks to measure doctors,” Martin said, and immediately regretting the hot-tempered reply, amended it. “But I can name some competent surgeons for you. There’s a Doctor Florio on the staff, and there’s a Dr. Harold Samson.”

“I’ll call them.”

“I can do it for you.”

“I’ll do it myself.”

Martin waited. He could see Moser in the telephone booth, dialing, hanging up and dialing again. He felt a strong current of compassion and at the same time anger, at the stinging rejection. What did the man think he was doing on Eastman’s service? Polishing shoes?

Mr. Moser came back. “Neither one of them is home. What do you doctors do, abandon the city because it’s a holiday?”

Martin didn’t reply.

“That’s all there are? There must be dozens of neurosurgeons around!”

“You said you wanted the best.”

“Well, give me second best, then.”

“You’re looking at one right now.”

“You’re pretty damned impertinent, you know that? Dr. Eastman ought to be told about you. I asked you for an
ether name, or I’ll call my internist and ask him, although God knows where he is tonight.”

Martin controlled his anger. “There is a man … He doesn’t work here at Fisk, but he has privileges here, and I believe he’d come.”

Mr. Moser sank onto the bench. He looked as though he had used his last strength.

“His name is Albeniz. It’s in the book.”

“Damned foreign name. I can’t think how to spell it You call him for me.”

Dr. Albeniz listened to Martin’s brief summary. “I would come for you,” he said, “but it’s impossible. I’m in bed with a cold and fever. Why don’t yon do it yourself?”

“I’m willing to, but the father wants someone better-qualified.”

“You’re perfectly qualified, Martin.”

“Not well enough, he thinks.”

“Well, if he can’t find anyone better and won’t accept you, you have no more responsibility in the case. Tell him so and let him go where he wants.”

“I’ll do that,” Martin said.

When he came back from the telephone, Mr. Moser had put his head in his hands and his shoulders were shaking. Martin stood over him.

“I can’t get Dr. Albeniz,” he said quietly. “He’s ill.”

Mr. Moser did not raise his head. “Then go ahead. I can’t do any more. Go ahead with whatever has to be done and God help you.”

Martin wasn’t quite sure, as he walked away, whether that had been a prayer or a threat.

Midnight lay beyond the windows when Martin entered the operating room. At the edges of white light, the world was gloomy green. Green walls and rumpled cotton. Green, refracted from the bottles in cabinets. Green, the sterile cloth on the table where, glittering like silver at a palace banquet, lay the tools: knives, drills, forceps and mallets.

Perry looked up, waiting, his eyebrows rising like parentheses above the mask. He had been fetched out of a
movie theater where he had been with his girl. Martin was thankful they had found him. There was something reassuring in the sight of those familiar eyebrows.

The assistants waited. A nurse put a second pair of gloves over Martin’s first pair. A fine calm came to him: I can do it.

On the girl’s naked skull, brown coagulated blood clumped in dark beads along the crooked wounds, like branching rivers on a map. Such strange thoughts he had, selecting a knife from the service row! His eyes narrowed; he could feel them tightening and sharpening. His lips pressed shut. And he brought the knife down, into a spurt of fresh, red blood, which was at once sucked up and sponged away. Down through the scalp the knife sliced, until the scalp was folded back on glistening bone.

Electric drill. Press hard, down through the bone. A drop of sweat starts on his forehead under the cap. Alertly, a nurse steps up to wipe it away. He remembers having seen the gesture in London. Braidburn sweated, but East-’ man never does.

The drill stops. He moves it slightly and applies it again. He is drawing a pattern, a small circle on the skull. Press hard. Careful, careful, not to penetrate the brain beneath the bone! Complete the circle. Now he has made a disc of bone; lift it out and ease the pressure on the brain: that is the object He is aware of voices, movements in the room, whispers and the swish of rubber-soled shoes. The clock lurches. A half hour ticks.

He asks Perry, “Everything all right?”

“Everything okay,” comes the answer.

“Steel blade,” Martin commands and it is handed to him. He flicks out the disc of bone and holds his breath, dreading, waiting for hemorrhage and gush of blood. No! For an instant, he is relieved. He calls for his magnifying glasses. When these have been strapped around his head, he peers in, and holds the breath back in his lungs again. He is conscious of his own heartbeat.

From the force of the blow, the smash of bone on metal, a splinter of that bone, needle-sharp, has pierced the dura mater. He perceives a leakage of the spinal fluid and sighs.
Dietz, the senior resident, is peering in, too. Now he draws away. Dietz’s eyes are very black—the rest of his face is hidden, but his eyes convey to Martin that he has seen and understood. It is somehow comforting to feel the comprehension of this intelligent young man. It is comforting to be surrounded by the whole quick, skillful team.

And carefully—oh, every movement is so tense, precise and careful—Martin eases, pries the needle-point of bone—he is almost panting now—and retrieving it securely between the bright tips of the forceps, hands it to the waiting nurse. He sighs, a deep, long involuntary sigh.

Now there is nothing to do but withdraw and wait. He has done all he can. The leakage will cease of its own accord or it will not. The meninges will heal without infection, or they will not. There will be a scar, that much is certain, and the scar will perhaps be normal, or it may not It may cause epileptic seizures at some later date, or it may not.

So he sutures the scalp. It is all over. Then he stands and looks down at the girl, while they wrap her head in folded white cloth: Hindu hat, lacking only a forehead jewel.

Her lashes lie on her childish cheeks. The purity of the unconscious face strikes him to the heart. He rips the gloves off and walks out and is terribly, terribly tired.

The parents were waiting in the outer hall. He was sorry that they had come to him before he could change his clothes, because their daughter’s blood had spattered on him and he saw them looking at it.

“We’ve done what we could,” he said, knowing it was not enough to tell them.

Moser opened his mouth to ask a question, but then the mother began to weep, and he led her away; it was a relief to Martin because he did not know what he could have answered if they had pressed him.

After he had changed his clothes, he thought of going home. But also he wanted to look at the girl again. He knew there would be nothing to see tonight. She would be unconscious far into the following day. Still, he wanted to
see her again. So he went to the coffee machine and had a cup and then another, before going upstairs.

The family had taken a suite, and she lay in the center of a large white room like a carved stone queen on a tomb: a long white ridge under white covers, with calm white eyelids.

“Can I get anything for you, Doctor?” He hadn’t noticed the nurse sitting in the corner. “Just tell me the time, please. My watch has stopped.”

“A quarter past two.”

“You’ll be here till seven?”

“No, sir. This isn’t my shift. I go off at midnight ordinarily, but the supervisor asked me to stay.”

The pitch and tone of the girl’s low voice attracted his attention, so that he strained through the weak light to see her. What he saw was the full body of a Venus and a mild young face, too round for beauty.

“Have I seen you before?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. I only came two weeks ago from Mercy Hospital.” She stood beside Martin looking down at the unconscious girl. “I’ve got her bridesmaid dress hanging in the closet Her mother said, Throw it out. I never want to see it again.’ But I couldn’t do that. Doctor, what’s going to happen to her?”

“You know better than to ask that,” he chided gently.

“Well, of course I really do. But this has really got to me tonight.”

He saw brimming tears, and he went on as gently as before, “You mustn’t let a case do this to you, or you’ll be torn up all the time, won’t you?”

“I know. I’m not at my professional best.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Sometimes I go so far as to think I wasn’t even meant to be a nurse! I take things too personally. And I wonder, are other people like me? You, for instance? You see this kind of thing all the time. What do you do about it? Can you just forget and go on to the next one?”

“I don’t forget. I store it away with all the other evils that happen in a lifetime, and I learn not to take them out or look at them too often.”

“I’m not always like this. Heavens, I wouldn’t want you to think I was! I just haven’t much resistance right now. You know the way you are after you’ve had the flu, for instance?”

“I know,” Martin said.

When the relief nurse came, they walked down the corridor together. In an island of light, a charge nurse worked on charts; beyond that island lay dark blue shadow.

“And have you just got over the flu?” he asked.

“Not the flu. A broken engagement. That’s why I transferred, to change my luck. Superstitious, I suppose. Would you like some coffee?”

“I don’t need a third cup, but I’ll take one anyway.”

There was no use going home now. He had office hours at nine, and three hours of sleep would be as bad as none at all. He followed her into the cubicle where the coffeepot stood on a table.

A nighttime chill came shivering through the window. The girl drew a sweater from a hook and warmed her hands around her cup. The sweater had a name tag: Hazel Janos.

“That’s me. Hungarian. People never pronounce the name right.”

“My best friend is Hungarian. Tom Horvath. He taught me to eat palachinken.”

“I make good palachinken, with cherries and sour cream.”

He sat back and observed her. She had very white skin, the kind that burns painfully at the beach. Her brown hair was too fine and soft She would be one of those women who always had trouble keeping it in order. Right now, pinned under the starched cap, it was tidy. She looked particularly clean. He wondered why nurses always did: surely they didn’t bathe more often than other people did?

Resting her chin on her hand, she looked out into the night sky. The outline of a rooftop made an isosceles triangle at the lower end of the window. She sighed.

“I’m curious about you,” Martin said.

“Why?”

“You’re all knotted up, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me about it? Or shall I mind my own business?”

“You really want to know?”

“Only if you care to tell me.”

So often people told him of their quarrels and debts and loves, and he usually wished they wouldn’t But now, for some reason, he wanted to hear this girl talk. Why? There was nothing remarkable about her, unless a lulling voice and a very female softness were remarkable.

“There’s not much to tell. It was only another case of a girl who wanted to get married and a man who didn’t.”

“I see.”

“Walter lost his job almost four years ago. I told him we could live on my salary till things got better. My folks have three rooms on the top floor where we live in Flushing and they’d have fixed them up for us. But he wouldn’t sponge, he said. So we just argued and argued and one day I gave him an ultimatum and I lost That’s it,” she finished quietly.

“Perhaps hell think it over,” Martin suggested.

“No. He’s gone to Kansas City. He has a brother there, and maybe his brother will find a job for him, I don’t know. I think he was just tired of things here, of all the wrangling and of me. And he just needed to get away to a new place. I can’t blame him, really. The juice seems to go out of things when you have to wait too long for them.”

“That’s true.”

“I’m twenty-eight and a virgin. Do you suppose that could have been my mistake? I sometimes wonder.”

Her candor touched Martin. “I honestly don’t know,” he said.

“Maybe in my heart I didn’t trust him. Oh, why am I telling you all this? Because you’re a doctor and people think they can say anything to a doctor that they wouldn’t say to anybody else?”

Oh Lord, not again he thought, and answered, “I think people feel that way.” He sensed that she was waiting for some positive statement, something that would be a com
fort, so he searched for something and came up only with a cliché. “Time heals everything, they say.”

“Do you believe that, honestly?”

“No,” he said.

She laughed. Her lips curved back on strong even teeth and the laugh changed her face. Comely, he thought. That’s the word. Comely.

“I’m not laughing because anything’s funny. I think it’s because I feel better for having told you. You’re the only person I’ve told besides my father and mother.”

He reflected, “I never do remember why laughter and tears are related. One of my professors in a philosophy course spent a week of lectures on the subject, but for the life of me I can’t remember what he said.” He bent forward, clasping his hands around his knees. “I have a little girl,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “I haven’t seen her since she was three years old, and she’s seven now.” And why
he
should be talking like this to
her
, he had no idea. “Her mother and I are divorced and she has custody. I thought maybe she would relent, let me see the child. I’ve asked often enough.”

“And?”

“And lawyers answered, reminding me of the terms of the divorce.”

“But that’s so cruel,” Hazel Janos said softly.

“Yes. The divorce was.” Not Jessie, he meant There was no cruelty in Jessie. He could understand her position quite well. And he sat still, thinking about that which would have been impossible to put into words and was yet so clear to him.

The girl said, “I rather thought there might be something else beside what they say about you.”

Martin looked up. “What they say about me?”