“OK, right; right, that’s essential. You want me to call her?”
“No—hell no; I don’t want her hearing it on the phone. Hey, you know Carole, you know how she is with Ben—somebody oughta be with her when she hears; she’ll go nuts if she just gets a phone call. I tried to reach Charlotte, but she’s not at home, and I guess she’s got her goddamn cellphone off—all I get’s the voice mail box—So if you can track Charlotte down, have her get in touch with Carole—She’s gotta be told in person, though, and gently, gradually, so she doesn’t get too scared. Then once you clue her in and find out what she wants to do—Carole, that is—and Charlotte too; she’ll probably want to come along—then let me know ASAP. If she’s coming out, or if both of them are coming out, I’ll have Brendan fly back and pick them up, and he can bring them straight to Cleveland—Sound like a plan?”
“Sounds like the only reasonable plan to me, sir. I’ll get it handled from my end and get back to you pretty quick.”
As it turned out, both the girls were at the club. No special occasion—just a Friday luncheon with the standard group of friends while the boys were out of town. Wine, gossip, hors d’oeuvres, some cultural interludes on the latest novels they’d just read, weekend trips they’d taken that summer to visit friends in the Hamptons or south to Virginia Beach or Hilton Head. Betsy Kellerman, the lawyer’s wife, had been to Portugal on an art-study tour. She brought some pictures, and everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed admiringly, even though half of them had been to the exact same places themselves, and thought the food was awful and the sights were just so-so. In the midst of all this cattiness and gaiety and boredom, the table of six was suddenly interrupted by the maître d’, who came quietly up to one of the ladies present and said in a diminutive voice, spoken close enough to her ear to raise a few of the eyebrows of her tablemates:
“Mrs. Parker? Apparently your cell phone’s off, ma’am, and someone’s trying to reach you. The caller said it’s urgent and private. Would you like to take it at my desk?”
“OK, sure, William. Any idea who’s on the phone?”
“I believe it’s the lady who works for your husband and Mr. Atherton—Cindy, I believe is her name.”
“Cindy! She tracked me here?—Oh, sure,” (Charlotte smiled; it was the absolute last time she’d smile for many, many weeks to come.) “Cindy could find your kid’s pet turtle if it crawled out in the yard. But I bet it’s about Eddie. That man of mine! You know how he is, William, don’t you? He must have left his wallet on the dresser—for the hundred-thousandth time, I’d guess! No license, no credit cards, and he’s out in—where exactly?—Ohio, I think. God! It’s lucky he’s got a neck to keep his head stuck on—Well, OK, William, I’m right behind you—Lead me to the phone.”
But it wasn’t the wallet; it wasn’t even Eddie’s head: it was worse, infinitely worse. Ten minutes later, Charlotte had Carole in the seat beside her—neither of them smiling, by the way—and was parking her Lincoln in the No Standing Zone in front of AthCorp’s headquarters; Dawson, the regular officer who’d patrolled the area these past fifteen years, and was a minor holder of AthCorp stock, would see to it that no one monkeyed with the car.
“What is it, Cindy?” asked Carole, once they got upstairs. She was concerned, but not unduly alarmed—you could see it in her face: serious, but short of being frightened. Some minor mishap with Ben: that was as far as Cindy had gone with her preliminary intro to Charlotte on the phone. No point in having them so distraught they’d crash the car, she figured. Besides, news like this should be presented directly to Carole the wife rather than to Charlotte the friend. The call to Charlotte was merely a means to have Carole delivered promptly and safely, a role that Eddie’s wife had compliantly and effectively fulfilled.
“Sit down, Mrs. A. You too, Mrs. P. There’s some stuff going on that both of you need to know about right away.”
Now their faces lengthened perceptibly and their eyes got very wide. And from their perspective, looking at Cindy, that big, round face of hers was different today than they had ever seen it in all the seven years they’d known her. Both of them picked up on it right away. Cindy was tremulous, red-eyed, hoarse; her voice quaked, she sniffled; there was a box of tissues on her desk and one of those crumpled tissues in her hand, which she used periodically to dab her eyes. They might have thought it was a cold, if not for the sadness graven on her face, the sagging of her pudgy cheeks, the drooping of her flaccid lips. Neither Carole nor Charlotte had ever seen Cindy one whit less than cheerful before, but she was way less than cheerful now. It was obvious to both of them that no, she didn’t have a cold; Cindy had been crying. Cindy was majorly distraught.
“Cindy! What is it? Tell me! Is it Ben? Is Ben OK?” This was a question that wasn’t merely asked by Carole; it was shrieked.
“He’s not OK, Mrs. A. It’s….”
Here Cindy’s voice broke off completely and the tears began to flow. And it was at this point that both the women sitting there in front of her understood that whatever was wrong was not just potentially bad; it was potentially disastrous.
“What, Cindy—What? Tell me.”
“It’s….” She tried once more, but she couldn’t get it out. Not right away. A minute passed before she got her cheeks sponged off with a few more tissues and found her voice again:
“OK, Mrs. A., I held it together for a while after I talked to Mr. P. before; he kind of reassured me. But after I hung up with him and started checking around to find you, I got to thinking, and it’s beginning to get me down. I apologize—All I’m doing is upsetting you further, and that was something I didn’t want to do. But what it is, ma’am, with Mr. A.—It’s the heart thing. He lied to us; he lied to all of us. He told us he was OK, but he wasn’t OK. He didn’t tell anybody the truth. He didn’t want anybody to know.”
“Where is he? I’ve got to go to him. Make arrangements, Cindy. Can you get me to him right away?”
“I’m working on it, ma’am. Brandon’s taking off right now, as we speak. He’ll be here in probably a couple of hours. Columbus is pretty close. Then he can fly you out. Or I can get you a flight from Newark instead, if you like, but by the time you get there and wait for a plane and go through all the airport hassle—it’ll probably be better and quicker if you stay here and let Brandon take you—That sound OK?”
“Where is he? Where am I going, Cindy? To Columbus, you said?”
“No, Brendan’s in Columbus, but Mr. A will be in Cleveland, ma’am, by the time they get you there. They’ll be transferring him by helicopter pretty soon. Mr. P. said it’s the best place in the country, with a doctor who knows just what to do, so they’ve arranged to take him there.”
“I’m going too,” said Charlotte. “We should all be with him, Carole. You and me and Eddie, and—Is the boy there too?—Tommy? Do you know if he’s there with Ben, or did he fly back home already?”
“He’s there, Mrs. P. He and Mr. P. are both with him. And … there’s something else I ought to tell you, Mrs. A. When he had his attack, it was just after they showed him that picture—The picture of the girl from Russia—You know who I mean?”
“From Russia? Oh, the girl who looks like Lizzie. But I thought Eddie had decided not to show him that just yet.”
“He did decide that, ma’am; he didn’t plan to show him. It wasn’t Mr. P. who brought it up. It was that Daugherty boy who mentioned it—the autistic one, you know?—and then Mr. A. asked to see it, I guess; and…. They couldn’t tell him no, so….”
“It’s alright,” said Carole. “It’s nobody’s fault. It had to come out sooner or later. And if Ben’s heart was getting bad, at least we know about it now and they’re bringing him to a doctor who can get it fixed. And you know something else, Cindy? As far as that girl is concerned, maybe it’s for the best anyway. Look how much better Ben’s been since the boy’s been around. Maybe now that he’s seen the picture of the girl, it’ll have the same positive effect.”
“Uh, well, Mrs.
A., since you brought the subject up?”
“Yes, Cindy? Something else?”
“The girl from Russia? Umm, Mr. A. asked to see her.”
“The picture, you mean, right?”
“No; he already saw the picture. He asked Mr. P. to bring him the real thing.”
“The girl? From Russia? He wants to see her? In person?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, is that possible, Cindy? Is it something any of us can actually do?”
“Actually, Mrs. A., she’s on the morning flight from Moscow tomorrow. I think that Mr. P. is planning to have her at Mr. A.’s bedside sometime tomorrow early afternoon.”
“You know something, Cindy? You know something incredible? If she looks as much like my darling sister Lizzie as that picture does, I can barely wait to see her myself.”
No family or civilians on the helicopter, so Brendan flew Tom and Eddie out to Cleveland on his way to Jersey to pick the ladies up. Cindy had a limo waiting on the tarmac, as usual. Unfamiliar car, unfamiliar driver, but the fellow knew his way well enough, and in little more than half an hour, they were at Ben’s bedside waiting anxiously for the patient to be gurneyed up.
The Clinic, as it happens, has a number of VIP suites, and one was available for Ben—When money’s no object, such suites are generally available, even if they have to throw the present tenant out. Impressive quarters, too: accommodations generally reserved for Arab sheiks, top-tier film celebs, and various and sundry major heads of state, replete with all the amenities the rich and famous would require in their very best hotels: Adjoining guest rooms for family and friends, adjacent meeting rooms for staff and counselors, associated kitchen facilities for one’s private chef to prepare one’s special meals with attention to one’s specific culinary tastes and dietary needs. Then down the corridor, full media and communication facilities: In short, every imaginable service to keep one in constant comfort and in constant contact with the world outside—unless one had a penchant to be alone and secretive, in which case one could be assured of total privacy, as though one’s suite were hermetically encased in lead.
Ben had connections, Eddie had connections, and when Tom and Eddie made it to the suite assigned, no other than Dr. Leander Cameron himself, the world’s preeminent specialist in idiopathic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, Geneva variant, was waiting impatiently, arms folded, at the door.
“You here for Mr. Atherton?” he asked, neither smiling nor frowning, but rather poker-faced. A good, objective clinician. If you’d been dead a week, his confident demeanor alone would convince you that you were still alive and well enough to pay your bill.
“Right,” said Eddie. “Ben Atherton, the head of AthCorp.”
“Family?”
“Close friends.”
“Alright. He ought to be up in a few minutes. I went over the records and our preliminary tests. I’m not supposed to discuss a patient’s condition with anyone other than the patient, you know, but I’ve got to talk to somebody. Your friend Mr. Atherton—I’m afraid he isn’t very amenable.”
“Not amenable, like how, Dr. Cameron? Tommy asked. “Not amenable to treatment? Is that what he told you?”
“That’s about it, young man. He’s very resistant to having anything done.”
“And what would you do if he wanted something done?”
“Well—You’re a friend, you say? You look like you might be his son.”
“I know, sir. It’s a long story. But what are the options? What could you do if Ben wanted to be treated?”
“Yes, well, he’s past the point of getting a septal myectomy, which is the procedure we usually use in hypertrophic Gennies—Genevas, that is. But he’s end-stage. His ejection fraction is…. But do you guys understand the terminology I’m using here?”
“I do,” said Tommy. “I’ve studied it a little. So—What are the figures on his cardiac function—the ejection fraction; what did they get?”
“Bad. Low. Mid-twenties. And his T-waves are flat, and the CO2 is up. The whole situation looks grim.”
“Oh God! That is bad, that’s awful!”
“Yes it is. That’s what I tried to get across to him, but he’s just not very responsive. Your friend’s a very stubborn guy.”
“OK, so let’s say we can convince him to get something done, what would you do exactly? If you can’t do your standard operation,” asked Tommy, “what other options do we have?”
“Heart transplant. That’s pretty much it.”
“A heart transplant!” Eddie looked horrified, sweating, white as the proverbial sheet post super-duper bleach. “How can you do a heart transplant on a guy who gets shipped to your place by a helicopter at 3:00 in the afternoon, for fuck’s sake! What do you do? Go out and hit some wino over the head and swipe his heart? I mean, I know we’re here in Cleveland, but—God!—even in Cleveland they gotta have some kinda laws against taking peoples’ hearts.”
“No, it doesn’t work that way, Mr. umm….
“Parker. Eddie Parker.” Eddie’s voice was reedy, quavering.
“It doesn’t work that way, Mr. Parker. We’ve got a list of potential recipients, and what we do, is we take them in order, first come, first served. But if the case is critical, like your friend’s, we move him up a little on the list and put in an implantable device in the interim until a suitable donor heart comes along. It may take a little while, but most of the patients get their transplants in the end.”
Eddie had a question, Tommy had a question, and both of them were just about to pose their questions simultaneously to the doctor, when the door swung open from the corridor, and a gurney appeared, then approached, on top of which gurney was Ben. The pair of orderlies who brought him up, hoisted him off the gurney, tucked him into bed, connected the leads on his chest to awaiting monitors, saw to it that the required beeps were beeping and the green lines on the monitors were popping up and down at the appropriate intervals and with the proper amplitudes, put some oxygen tubing in his nose. And when they were done with their duties and gone, a middle-aged nurse with peppery hair, unblinking eyes, foreboding frown lines, and what gets referred to in the hood as ‘a attitude’, grabbed the chart, opened the door to the patient’s room, screwed her face into a nasty scowl, and told the three men (this including the doctor too) that they were now permitted to go on in.
Ben was cheerful; he seemed to be the only one: “Hey, why all the long faces, guys? You too, Doc. You’ll get your bill paid whether I live or die. And I’m not dying yet, I can promise you that. There’s some important stuff I’ve still got to do.”
“You’re considering the surgery then?” asked the doctor. Other than a millimeter lifting of his eyebrows and a minimal puckering of his lips, there still was no discernible expression on his face.
“Getting a new heart, you’re asking?” Ben smiled.
“Eventually. First the implantable pump, then we’ll see.”
“But the device you’re talking about—the pump—That’s just a stopgap measure. Just to keep me hanging by a thread until a transplant’s done—am I right?”
“Essentially, that’s correct.”
“So basically, all we’re talking about, bottom line, is the transplant—And for that, the sooner the better; is that accurate as well?”
“Yes, basically that’s true.”
“Well, this may interest you, doctor, or it may not; but it happens that I actually know a man who had a heart transplant. You may know him yourself, Doctor Cameron, but we’ll leave his name out of it for now. Let’s just say he’s a prominent man who used to run a big corporation—which is the reason that I know him, by the way: He had to sell his company, and we wound up buying in. He was sick at the time, and not long afterward, he wound up having the transplant done—done here, actually, I believe, and maybe done by you. I didn’t see him for a while afterward, what with his recuperation and all. And then there was a ceremony at the company we bought—An honorarium, I guess it was—and the
former owner of the company was there. And, considerate guy that I am, I went over and sat with him, and talked with him, and I made the grave mistake of asking how he felt and how he was doing. Twenty minutes later, I left the place depressed. And, since I’ve got your wholehearted attention, doc, I’m going to tell you why: The poor guy had had a stroke, he was blind in one eye from a blood clot, and he had a devil of a time trying to remember my name. He’d lost a lot of his hair, although I guess some shaggy spots grew back, he had bruise marks on every exposed surface of his skin, and he weighed maybe a hundred pounds, if that. Not a pretty picture, is what I’m getting at. So let me ask you then, doctor, is what happened to him a rare occurrence?”
“Not rare, no. I wouldn’t call it rare, but not that common either. Most of our patients do better than the man you say you know.”
“Well let me ask you this then: What are the odds of someone going through the transplant and coming out of it with exactly the same physical and mental faculties he had when he went in?”
“Exactly the same? None of us are exactly the same as we were ten minutes ago, are we? Time and aging take their toll.”
Ben nodded his head. Tommy watched and Eddie watched as he reclined on the bed propped up by the backrest and a pillow or two, the covers tucked tight around his feet. He was thinking, maybe considering, but maybe not. Maybe he’d already made up his mind. And when he finally spoke, it was evident that the latter of the two options was correct. His mind was made up, made up thoroughly, and like everything else in Ben’s brilliant and perceptive thought process, the conclusion he had reached was reasonable and couldn’t be effectively refuted, even by an expert. And it went accordingly:
“Let me ask you something else, doctor: You like what you’re doing, yes?—the diagnostic challenges and complicated surgery and all?”
“I do; I like it very much.”
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