Sons from Afar (15 page)

T
he answer to James's letter about the clerical job came quickly, which surprised him. A. S. Landros, the person who wrote the answer, was one of two doctors whose names were printed at the top of the stationery. The answer asked James to come in for an interview, which also surprised him. He guessed he should have known there would be an interview, however; you didn't just hire somebody from a letter. He wasn't sure he wanted to go in for an interview. He didn't know what they would ask him, he wouldn't know what to say, and people didn't take to him, so an interview would probably mean he wouldn't get the job. But he wanted the job, so he would have to go to the interview.

James wore khakis instead of jeans the day he was going to be interviewed. He rode his bike to school, because he would need it to get home on. He spoke to the baseball coach at the start of practice, to tell him he wouldn't be there.

The coach looked at him when he said that. “What's your excuse?” the man asked, as if James—who had missed just one practice, and no games, all spring long—was in the habit of making excuses to miss sports.

“I have a job interview.”

“A job interview is it? Does that mean you'll be leaving the team?”

James had been thinking that with any luck it would turn out
he'd have to drop baseball, but when the coach asked that, as if he really wanted to say
quitting
instead of
leaving
, he said “No, sir.” It was only a few more weeks. He could stick it out for a few more weeks. All he had to do was hold on—and he'd been doing that all spring long, so a few more weeks wouldn't hurt him. He could make it through a few more weeks, he hoped.

The doctors' office was out on the north side of town, inland, a white stucco one-story building set back from the road at the end of a straight driveway. In that part of town, some of the fields had been cut up into square lots and ranch-style houses had been plopped down on them. James rode his bike up the paved driveway to the office. A sign by the door said
A. S. LANDROS, GENERAL PRACTICE. LESLIE O'HARA, OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY.
The letter had told James to come by any afternoon between three and five, so he opened the door and went in, not knowing what to expect, what to plan to say.

He entered a waiting room, where a couple of pregnant women sat reading magazines in chairs, and a black man of about fifty sat on a sofa, looking at his hands. An empty desk, with a phone on it, had been set at the far side of the room. The one big window looked out over the parking lot. Beside the window stood tall filing cabinets.

James didn't know what he was supposed to do. There were voices down the corridor that led off the waiting room, but he didn't feel right about just walking down there. He sat in a chair near the empty desk. After a while, a woman in a nurse's uniform came out to sit at the desk. A middle-aged black woman whose hair was streaked with silver followed and the man rose from the sofa to greet them. The man wanted to ask the woman questions, but she just shook her head at him, to keep him from speaking.

The nurse handed the woman a slip of paper. “Dr. Landros
will call you when the X-ray results come in. Your appointment's tomorrow, so we should hear by early next week.”

The woman nodded her head. She opened her purse and paid her bill. The nurse gave her a receipt. The man put his arm around the woman's shoulders, but she shrugged it off.

“You're not to eat anything until the X-rays have been taken. You know that? Only water to drink.” The nurse gave these instructions to both husband and wife. Both of them nodded their heads. The woman wouldn't even look at her husband. Her shoulders were high and stiff, her back perfectly straight, her elbows tight in against her ribcage. Beside her, the man looked clumsy and ashamed, with his neck bent a little and his shoulders sagging, his hands just hanging at his sides. He followed her out of the building, catching the door she pulled open for herself. The nurse was writing something on a piece of paper.

Through the window, James watched the couple as they went to their car. As soon as they were in the parking lot, the woman turned to the man and leaned against his shoulder. She was tall enough so her face fit right into his neck. He put his arms around her, and patted her shoulder, and she let him comfort her, now that they were alone together, and private.

“And what can we do for you, young man?” the nurse called James to attention. Before he could answer, she looked across the room at the pregnant women. “It'll be just five minutes before we take you in, Mrs. Grogan. Hello, Mrs. Johnson, how are you feeling today?” Before they could answer, her attention returned to James. She looked friendly enough, but in a hurry.

“I'm supposed to come in for an interview,” he said. “With Dr. Landros, he wrote me a letter but I left it home.”

“She,” the nurse said, amused.

“I'm sorry,” James said, although he could have pointed out that he had no way of knowing.

“It's a common enough mistake. Well, I can take you right in—her next appointment's going to be late, it seems. But you might get interrupted.”

“That's all right,” James said. “Or I could wait,” he suggested, not knowing what he should say.

“Better grab the chance you have,” the nurse said, leading him down the corridor and into an office with a big desk, framed diplomas on the wall, and a bookcase. She told him to wait.

James waited. He sat down and waited, and then wandered around and waited, reading the titles of the books on the shelves, reading the diplomas. Finally, a stumpy woman with short bristly dark hair and a white doctor's jacket on over her gray skirt entered the room and sat down at the desk. James returned to the chair facing her. She had a rough, square face, with no makeup. Her little eyes were brown and had pouches of flesh underneath them. Everybody in that place looked tired, he thought. He watched her blunt fingers search through papers on her desk.

“James Tillerman,” she said when she had found the letter he'd written.

“Yes, ma'am,” he answered, sitting up straight. He thought she was probably in her forties, from the lines around her eyes and mouth. She wasn't married.

“We had a number of inquiries about the position, but yours looked the most promising,” she told him, her eyes on the letter.

“It did?”

“You can spell and write a clear sentence,” she said. “You seemed to try to be honest about anything that might be against you. Your age. Your bicycle.”

“Thank you,” James said. She was the kind of person who made him sit up straight and pay attention.

“The letter could be a slick con job, of course,” she said. “Is it?”

“No, ma'am,” he told her. “I don't think so.”

“Do you want the job?” she asked him. She certainly didn't waste time deciding things.

“Can I do the work?”

“James, it doesn't require one of the great minds of the Western world to file and fill out insurance forms. To answer the phone. I assume you do well in school?”

“A's,” James told her, for once proud to be able to say just that.

“Unless the educational system has taken a complete dive—which, as a taxpayer, I sincerely hope is not the case—you should have no trouble with the work. It'll be only a few hours a week, I don't think more than ten to start with. We've only been down here, my partner and I, for a few months. Business isn't booming. I should warn you: We're liable to need someone full-time as things get busier, so it's not a permanent job.”

“Yes, ma'am,” James said.

“So you'll take it?”

“I'd like to,” James told her. “But—” Her mouth moved impatiently. He hurried on. “I have to ask my grandmother's permission. We live with my grandmother. She'll give it, I'm pretty sure, but I do have to ask her first.”

“I can see that.”

“And for a few weeks, not long, I can only come on Saturdays. Because of sports,” he explained.

“You don't look the athletic type,” she remarked, looking at him.

“I'm not. But anyway the season ends in just three or four weeks, and then I can come after school. Because there won't be late practices, or games.” He wondered, if she said he had to be able to come after school starting right away, if that would be reason enough to quit the team. He decided it might be, and he hoped she'd say that.

“All of that's fine by me. We have office hours Saturday
morning. Let me get my partner, so if she doesn't like the look of you she can tell us now. I should warn you, she wanted to get another nurse, not a file clerk. But I made her see reason. It's the paperwork we need help with, at this point, not the weighing-in and sampling of blood.”

James didn't say anything. He wouldn't know about that. Dr. Landros picked up her phone and pushed a button. “Leslie? Can you step into my office just for a minute? That young man is here.”

The other doctor was younger, but not married either. She had a stethoscope around her neck, and all she did was take a quick look at James's face, shake his hand, say “Good,” and leave. James had a job.

*   *   *

Gram wasn't even surprised when he told her he'd been offered a job. “You're old enough,” she said. She asked him what he'd be doing and he told her. “You'll do well,” she said, her attention on the chunk of potato she was swooshing around in the pot roast gravy. “I've never heard of these doctors,” she said.

“But—” Sammy started.

James interrupted, to answer Gram's question. “They're new here, they just opened up a few months ago.”

“You make them sound like some store,” Gram objected.

“But, James—” Sammy tried.

“What do you know about them?” Gram asked, in her unquestioning way. James thought to himself how he liked the way his grandmother took it for granted that he'd get a job, as if it wasn't anything so special.

“They're women,” he told her.

“So,” she said, looking at him, “are fifty percent of the people in this world.”

James was only trying to tell her whatever was different from
what would be predictable. “Actually, it's closer to fifty-two percent,” he corrected.

“Present company not excepted,” she continued, looking around the table.

James gave up, and laughed. “Okay, okay. One's a GP and one's an obstetrician. It's a small office and when they get busier they'll want somebody full-time.”

“Yeah, but who—” Sammy tried again.

“You can wait a minute,” Gram said to him. She turned her attention back to James. “Clerical work, just thinking about doing it makes my ears droop.”

“Not me,” James promised her. “I'll need work papers.”

“I can still sign my name,” Gram said. “Now, Sammy, what is it?”

“Who'll go crabbing with me?” Sammy demanded.

“I may be able to,” James said. “I don't know what hours I'll be working. Or you could get one of your friends to work with you.”

“But then we'd have to split the money with him,” Sammy pointed out.

“I could do it,” Maybeth offered.

“That's a
good
idea,” James said. She looked so pleased that he admitted, “I never even thought of it.” He wondered how difficult it was on her, always to be treated as slow-minded, and maybe stupid, as if you couldn't have good ideas just because you weren't good at schoolwork. James still hadn't gotten over getting the job, and so easily. He never would have thought he'd write the best application letter.

“Anyway, you won't make as much money,” Sammy continued. “How much are they paying you?”

That stopped James in his tracks. “I think three twenty-five, but I didn't ask.”

“I'm glad to see your self-sufficiency is flawed,” Gram remarked, but James barely heard her he was so surprised at his oversight.

He was making, he learned the next Saturday, three fifty an hour, which meant he'd earned seventeen fifty by the time they closed the office at two. James had spent his time quietly at the back of the office, behind the desk, sorting and alphabetizing, finding old file folders or starting new ones, and studying the long insurance claim forms to see what information went into which boxes. When he had any questions he asked the nurse, but he didn't have many. If you thought about them, things made sense. All the five hours he was aware of the coming and going of patients in the office, of the doctors doing their work, and the nurse coming and going between the desk and the phone and the back examining rooms. He liked the work, and the office. He didn't exchange more than a few words with his bosses. “The accountant will get the check in the mail Monday, first thing,” Dr. Landros said as they locked the door behind them at two.

“Thank you, ma'am,” James said.

“Don't call me that. I'm a doctor.”

If James hadn't known Gram, he would have been sure he'd made the doctor angry. As it as, he wasn't sure he hadn't. He made a mental note to address both the doctors as doctor, from then on.

The check arrived on Wednesday, and James signed up the next day to go on the school trip to Annapolis. How he'd get shed of the group, he didn't know; but he'd think of something, once they got there. He had a lot to think about, so baseball barely dented his consciousness, even when he was at practice and actually had to do something. He had the English paper to write. He went ahead and wrote it on kings in
Macbeth
; he didn't have time to think out another topic, and he didn't want to do
another. By the time he handed the paper in, nine typed pages and one more of footnotes, he had forgotten that he hadn't done the exact assignment she'd wanted, so when she smiled at him and asked if the paper was going to be as good as usual he just answered yes. He heard a voice nearby say, “Did you hear that?” and another voice answer, “Yeah, but he doesn't have anything else to do but get the grades and butter up the teachers.” James would have liked to turn around and see who had said that, but he didn't. Besides, it wasn't as if he was kidding himself about people liking him, anyway.