by Anthology
The nun he asked failed to reply.
Ostensibly, visiting hours were to protect the patients from disturbances in the form of Aunt Martha (“Yaas, I knew someone who had the selfsame operation, my dear. She died, poor soul.”) and the like. But new mothers were not sick. It was obvious to Robert Barber that the prescribed hours—and the far greater number of proscribed ones—were for the convenience of a hospital staff whose mystique suffered from a surfeit of Commoners noticing their humanness. Naturally this assumption was strengthened by the fact that physicians, nurses, interns, residents, orderlies, Candy-Stripers, Gray Ladies, Pink Ladies, and the Lady pushing the cart peddling magazines and tissues disturbed the patients far more than “lay” visitors.
The inescapable prayers on the loudspeaker every night were rather disturbing, too.
But Robert Barber was a determined man. He had noticed that there were two kinds of people in hospitals, aside from the patients: Those Who Belong, and Others. The Others visited and indeed seemed to exist only by the sufferance of anyone who wore white shoes or a lab coat. Or carried a little black satchel. All one had to do, Bob Barber decided, was to act as if one Belonged.
So he adopted protective coloration. Carrying his black briefcase and striding purposefully, he traversed the hallowed and antiseptic halls.
“Good-evening-nurse,” he said briskly, barely deigning to see the deferential girls who ducked respectfully out of his way. “Sister,” he said to the nuns who were not quite so deferential: after all, doctor or no doctor, he was only a man, and a layman at that. But they nodded and rustled aside nevertheless.
Thus did the fiercely independent Bob Barber disregard Visiting Hours for four days running.
The fateful day arrived without portentous occurrence in the skies. Jodie Barber was pronounced ready to go home by a duly authorized member of the American Magicians Association. Thanking the kindly old AMA shaman-priest, Bob went down to settle with the cashier. She ruled a smallish domain separated from the world by a counter-cum-window that reminded him of a bank. She regarded him with the usual expression: as if he had committed a crime.
He had not.
He was about to.
“You seem to have placed your wife in a better room than your hospitalization covers, Mister Barber.” Her tone was the same you’ve heard in movies when the prosecutor says, “Then you were indeed at or near the scene of the crime on the night of March 21st!”
Bob Barber smiled and nodded. “Yes. I should owe you about forty dollars, right?”
She nodded wordlessly, giving him an exemplary imitation of the gaze of the legendary basilisk.
Frowning a little, wondering if it were a communicable disease, Robert Barber also nodded, again. “Uh, well . . .”
“Would-you-like-to-pay-the-balance-by-cash-or-check, Mister Barber?”
He hesitated, he told an interviewer years later, waiting for the words THIS IS A RECORDING. He had recognized good salesmanship; the room was “better,” not “more costly” than his insurance covered. Now he’d been given the standard “fatal choice”: cash or check. “Send me a bill, please. You have my address.”
“Mister Barber, our policy is that all bills are handled upon the release of the patient.”
He remarked on that word “handled” later, too. Not “paid.” She had taken a course in salesmanship/semantics! “Yes, well, you’ve got $237.26 coming from the hospitalization and $40 from me. Just send me a bill at the end of the month like everyone else, will you?”
His smile failed to bring one in return. “We have a policy, Mister Barber, of not dismissing the patient until the bill has been settled in full.”
“We’ve got an out then, ma’m. My wife isn’t a patient here. We merely came here because it’s a more convenient place for our doctor to watch the baby being born. Now . . . my car is back by the Emergency Door, and my wife’s all packed.” He gave her his very best boyish smile. “Am I supposed to sign something?”
It didn’t work. She sighed. “Mister Barber, you just don’t seem to understand. It’s a rule, Mister Barber. A hospital rule. We cannot dismiss the patient until the bill has been settled.”
Bob Barber shoved his hands into his trousers pockets and squared his shoulders. She not only hadn’t a cerebral cortex, he thought, she was missing her ovaries and needed a heart transplant! He firmed his mouth. “OK,” he said. “If you must keep hostages, that’s your business. But I’m sure one will do. Mrs. Barber and I are leaving in a few minutes. We are nursing the baby, so my wife will be coming back six times daily. The baby’s name is Mary Ann, by the way.” He smiled in his confidence, enjoying her shocked look. “When she’s big enough to go to college we’ll send you the tuition money.” He grinned and waited for the backdown. He was without doubt the first man in history to call her bluff.
When Mary Ann Barber was six years old her father picked her up at the hospital each day to transport her to school. Each Friday she brought him a bill. It had passed $9,000 when she was partly through the first grade.
She entered the tenth grade at age fourteen. On her fourth day as a Junior, she handed her daddy a bill for $106,378.23. She was one of the brightest girls in high school, and one of the healthiest. She had absorbed a tremendous amount of knowledge and sophistication, talking with interns. And it was easy to remain healthy, living in a hospital.
She had been moved from Nursery to Pediatrics to Children’s Ward to Second Floor. Then the interns had doubled up to make her a gift: a private room away from the patients. Her parents visited her twice daily, usually. At visiting hours.
There were the Staff and Board Meetings, the magazine and newspaper articles, the interviews. Offers to pay Mary Ann Barber’s daily-increasing bill had come from all over the country, as well as from seventeen foreign nations and the governments of two. The hospital had offered to settle for ninety cents on the dollar. Then seventy-five. Fifty cents. Forty. Bob Barber said he was holding out for the same terms the Feds had given James Hoffa.
On her fourteenth birthday Mary Ann received one thousand, two hundred seventy-one cards. Shortly thereafter she received 1,314 Christmas cards. Her clothing came from one manufacturer, her shoes from another, her school books from two others. Her tuition arrived anonymously each year. Bob Barber solemnly invested it in an insurance annuity in his daughter’s name. Most of the clothing she never wore; the parochial school she attended required sexless, characterless uniforms of navy-blue jumpers over white blouses. And black shoes. And white socks, rolled just to here.
She was graduated from college at nineteen and entered medical school at once. The doctors had won; the nuns had tried to sell her on the convent, the nurses on being an airline stewardess or secret agent. Mary Ann was far too fond of interns.
On his daughter’s twenty-first birthday Robert Barber received his now-monthly itemized bill. It was thirty-seven feet long, neatly typed by the hated machine he called an Iron Brain, Malefic. The bill totalled $364,311.41, very little of which was for anything other than room and board. The discount had been applied and figured for him as usual, although this time he noticed he was asked for only twenty cents on the dollar. Still, $72,862.28 was more than he had available. He sent the usual note:
I agreed to forward the forty dollars outstanding on my daughter’s bill at the end of the month of her birth. When the bill arrived it was for $130, including ten days at $9 for Nursery Care. I returned it, requesting a corrected total of $40. Had you responded I would have had a daughter all these years, like other people. You chose to advise that I owed you for the time she spent in the hospital past the day I took my wife home. I disagreed then and I disagree today; those additional ten days were spent in your institution at your request, not mine. And not hers. Thus, since you claim to be a non-profit organization and the courts have refused to uphold me in prosecuting for kidnap-at-ransom, I am still willing to pay the $40. However I cannot do this until I receive a proper bill for that amount, so that I can account
for it on my income tax return.
—Robert S. Barber
PS: The enclosed check is to cover all expenses for my daughter’s recent tonsillectomy. Actually, had I had a choice I would have chosen another hospital providing better care, but she advises your service was satisfactory.
—RSB.
It was signed, as usual, with a flourish. You can see for yourself; the hospital threw away the first few, but they have a file of 243 of those letters. Two hundred thirty-seven of them are printed.
There was another Board Meeting. The vote still went against bowing to Barber’s request for a total bill of $40, although Board members calculated that the bookkeeping had cost them $27.38 a year. But—in the first place, What Would People Think if they learned hospitals are fallible, and admit errors? In the second, Eli R. Hutchinson, president of the biggest bank in town and a board member for thirty-six years, absolutely refused to agree to the $40 settlement unless it included interest. Simple interest on the original amount came to $50.40. Barber had rejected that six years ago.
As they left the Board Meeting William Joseph Spaninger, MD, was heard to mutter to Sister Mary Joseph, OP, RN, “Well, Hutch can’t live forever.”
Sister Mary Joseph shook her head and rattled her beads. “You’re a sinful man, Doctor Spaninger. Besides, Mister Hutchinson had a complete physical last week. He’s in ridiculously good health.”
Mary Ann Barber, as noted, graduated from Med School at 23 and made an extraordinary grade on her Boards. By that time she had turned down seven offers from six magazines to be photographed as their Nubile Young (semi) Nude (semi) Virgin of the month; three major studios who wanted to film her life story—two with herself in the starring role; seven hundred twenty-four written, wired, and cabled offers of matrimony, and six offers of the same from fellow medical students. There were other offers, most of them from fellow med students, most of them less formal.
Special arrangements were made for her to intern at home: Saint Meinrad Medical Center. The interns are salaried at exactly one hundred twenty dollars monthly. Doctor M. A. Barber began on the first of September.
At exactly midnight on the tenth she moved her possessions out of the hospital and just as quietly moved into a long-empty room at her parents’ home. At two AM she returned to the hospital to go on duty.
Her departure was discovered at 8:30, while she was assisting—medicalese for watching—Doctor Spaninger perform a Pilonidal Cystectomy on a nineteen-year-old college student. Dr. Spaninger glanced up at the frantically-signaling nun in the doorway, then looked at Doctor Barber. Her eyes smiled at him above her mask. He shook his head at the nun and pulled his brows down at her as ferociously as possible. Doctor Mary Ann Barber smiled sweetly at her.
“What’s she want?” Dr. Spaninger asked as they smoked a cigaret in the Physicians’ Lounge after what he called a Tailectomy. He was very popular among nurses, residents, and interns, who called him the nearest-human doctor in town.
“Probably discovered I moved out last night. At midnight.”
“Moved out of the hospital? My god, girl! You’ve run away from home!”
She shook her very blonde hair. “No doctor. I moved to home. It’s quite a lovely room, although it certainly smells odd.”
He nodded. “That’s air. O2 and some other stuff, nitrogen, hydrogen; you know. No antiseptics. No medicines. Possibly a little chintz, and some mothballs. Take some getting used to, I guess.” He gazed at her, brows down. “But you’re a . . . resident here. A resident resident, I mean, not a medical one. Let’s don’t go into it; I’ve been on the damned Hospital Board twenty years, and I’ve been living with the infamous Barber case all twenty of ‘em. You can’t leave. You have a hell of a bill here. Or your irascible, independent, atavistic, heroic old S.O.B. of a father does.”
She pulled off the surgery cap and her hair flew as she shook her head with a very bright smile. “Nope. He doesn’t. I signed some papers assuming all my own bills, debts, etcetera etcetera the day I turned twenty-one. I’m his daughter, you know; I agree with him. He didn’t much like that, but I used the word ‘independent’ and he shut up pretty fast. That’s Sacrament at his—my house. Then I told him my plan. That really shut him up, after he stopped laughing.”
Dr. Spaninger waited. Then he sighed, looked at his watch, and leaned back, lighting another cigaret. She also had a cigaret out; he pushed the lighter back into his pocket.
“Don’t play woman with me, Doctor,” he said. “You’re much too independent, competent and professional for me to insult you by lighting your cigaret. Besides, I’ve diapered you a few times. Never sent a bill, either.” He watched a snake of smoke writhe up to the ceiling. “All right Mary Ann, I’ll bite. What’s your Plan?”
“Was. It’s completed. I started here on the first of September, at $120 a month. September hath thirty days. That’s four whole U.S. rasbuckniks a day.”
“Um-hm. Shameful. We do everything we can to keep you yunkers out of the profession, including starve you out.”
“We won’t go into that either, overworked but wealthy old physician. Well, as of midnight last night I had worked ten days. That’s forty dollars worth. I moved out. And left a note at the desk; I’m to receive only eighty dollars this month. We’re even.”
He leaned back and laughed. Loudly. Long. Eventually he grew rather red in the face and leaned over to slap his knee. His concerned young ward warned him about his blood pressure. He nodded, gasping and choking.
“Wait till they hear THIS! Wait’ll Eli Hutch hears this! Oh, wonderful! We’re shut of the Barber case at last!” He looked at her and frowned again. “Unless the rest of the Board decides to sue you . . . hm. I’ll take care of that in advance. The only Barber I want to hear about hereafter is Doctor Barber. I hope I never hear the name Robert S. Barber again!”
“That’s not very charitable, but Daddy and I are opposed to charity anyhow. I promise you this: my son won’t be named Rober—what you said. He will be named William Robert Joseph Barber, OK?”
Dr. William Joseph Spaninger stared at her. “What . . . son?”
She shrugged. “Oh, the one I’ll eventually have. I’m trying to decide now which of my fellow interns is the most promising-looking.” She smiled at him. “No, I will not be an OB patient any ways soon. Not till I’ve finished up here, anyhow. And probably not till after I’m married.”
“Thank god. But that’s a dang lie—you’re stuck on young Chris Andrews and you know it.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Well. How the devil do you plan to exist on eighty bucks this month?”
“I won’t have to. I am receiving forty dollars from Daddy. He says the bill was his responsibility, anyhow. We accept our responsibilities in my family.”
Dr. Spaninger waved a hand at the hospital. “Nonsense. This is your family, and I haven’t found two people here willing to accept responsibility in the past twenty years. And I hope you will allow me, as a token of an old girl-watcher’s admiration for a very good-looking one, to give you a check for exactly $40 for your birthday. Your father’s giving you the forty sounds suspiciously like charity, and I really hate to see the old bas—rascal start changing, now. He’s a great man. Just for god’s sake don’t ever tell him so. And . . . carry on his work.”
“I intend to. I’ll spend the rest of my life bucking the System and marking ‘PLEASE’ in all those nasty DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE blocks and punching extra holes in computer cards. But he’s a greater man than you think, O Revered Father-image. I said I was receiving the money from him, Doctor. I did not say anything about charity. It’s a business arrangement; Daddy pays only for value received. For the duration of the month, on my hours off-duty from here, I’m on KP at home.”
Afterword
This one wasn’t too dangerous because it will probably happen. Only the IR (I do not call them “service” because I do not lie) people are more arrogant than hospital exchequers. They have to be; it’s amazing how much costs have risen sin
ce free Medicare came along. If it paid all the bill for those people who are now going in hospital for rests, your tax bill and mine would be even worse. Since it doesn’t, we have to pay for them when we’re hospitalized, just like everything at the grocery is a penny or 3 higher because you and I help defray the cost of shoplifters.
Besides, “For Value Received” is half-true. Down to the break, when Bob Barber calls the hospital’s bluff. Bob Barber is me. Jodie is my wife. Mary Ann is my daughter Scotty. I wanted to visit my wife when I wanted to, not when it was convenient for the hospitaleers. So I carried a black bag, acted brusque and Belonging, and was naturally mistaken for a member of the American Magicians’ Association: AMA. The creature at the desk said everything to me the one in the story does. I owed a lousy forty bucks, and was not accustomed to being treated as if I were at a world sf convention or something. So I called her bluff. I said exactly what Mary Ann’s dad says in the story. After staring at me in shocked silence, she backed apoplectically away and went into a little opaque-glass cubicle. (Just like the guy at the car lot. You know; he always has to go ask the boss if he can let you have the cigaret lighter for only $9.95 instead of $10.00.)
I waited. A black-bonneted head came out. Looked me over. I was in Uniform: suit, shirt, tie. Only a fool wears anything else at hospital check-out desks or in traffic court. Head withdrew. The Creature returned. I was let off; all she wanted was name and address and phone number, which she already had. Checking. I started to go, once again having won a Great Victory over an Established Faith (did Harlan tell you about how I got the tax people off my back by writing The President?).
“Uh . . . Mister offutt . . . you WILL pay this, won’t you?”
I swear. I gave her my best don’t-you-wish-you-knew-who-your-father-was look and departed. With wife and offutt-spring.
