“Howdy, boss,” he said. “My turn. You ready to sign out?”
“You bet, Wally. The neurosurgeon resident just took my last case up to the OR. Top this one—suicide attempt by crossbow. He came in awake and alert with this thing sticking out to here.”
Wally Deutch shrugged.
“Not bad, Jack, not bad, but when I was in Baltimore, we had a guy who tried to do himself in with a nail gun. He fired six ten-pennies up to the hilt into his skull, and he didn’t even have a headache. Walked up to registration. The triage nurse didn’t believe him and made him wait in the lobby for a couple of hours. By the time I saw him, he just looked a little cross-eyed.”
“You’re full of it, Walter.”
“No, God’s truth.”
“Listen, I have to run over to the faculty meeting now.”
“That’s right,” said Deutch. “Today’s the big vote. So, how do you think it’ll go? You don’t look so confident.”
Jack shrugged. “All we can do is keep trying.”
“I hate to tell you again, Jack, but if they shoot this project down and we can’t get properly staffed, I’m leaving.”
“Maybe you and me both.”
II
An Old Friend Returns
Taking a shortcut, Jack left the ED and found a world completely transformed. It was mid-October and early for snow, even in this mountainous part of New York State; but the ground was blanketed, and large wet flakes still settled from the overcast sky like tufts of down from a million geese. The air was delicious to breathe, and he felt his mind clearing, the fatigue falling away.
He made his way up the unshoveled sidewalk along Beech Avenue toward the original three-story hospital, a brick building all but engulfed by the new medical school on one side and the clinical towers on the other. He pushed through the tarnished brass doors, stomped off his shoes and entered what had once been the main gateway to New Canterbury Medical Center.
One corner of the old lobby had been turned into a coffee and pastry shop, but the rest had been left to gather dust in its original state—murals, wooden wainscoting, oak receptionist’s station, well-worn leather chairs and sofas, three brass-and-crystal chandeliers and a threadbare oriental carpet. Toward the back of the space, a deeply worn marble staircase led up to the mezzanine, where busts of famous physicians studded the granite balustrade. He stood in the dimness and gazed around; the meeting didn’t start for another fifteen or twenty minutes.
Someone called his name from the shadows, and a short, slender man with hair as white as the snow falling outside approached. A smile broke out on Jack’s face.
“Dr. Gavin,” he said. “What a surprise. It’s great to see you, sir.”
“It’s good to see you, too, my young friend. I’ve missed you.”
His old mentor's handshake felt as firm as ever.
“When did you get back?”
“About two this morning. I made it from Rio de Janeiro to New Canterbury in eighteen hours. I should be napping, but I wanted to catch the meeting this morning. I especially wanted to speak with you, so this is fortuitous.”
“What brings you back early?”
“I just found out about Lester Zyman’s death.”
Jack was embarrassed. “Of course. Please accept my condolences.”
“We were very old friends, and he was a great man, indeed,” said Gavin. “I'm heartbroken I missed his memorial service. But I was on a research trip up the Rio Purus, and we had no communication.”
“We all knew you couldn't get back, sir. Bad luck.”
“Bad luck all the way around. When I returned to my office at the university in Rio, there were two unpleasant messages waiting for me. One was the news of Lester's death, and the other was a letter…”
He waited for the older man to continue, but Gavin’s face paled, and his eyes lost their focus. Jack took a step closer.
“Dr. Gavin, are you all right?”
When Gavin’s gaze rose to meet Jack’s, his eyes held a look of anger that in all the years Jack had known the man he’d never seen there before.
“The letter, my young friend, was from Les himself. He wrote it to me the day before he died.”
Jack felt his throat tighten.
“Tell me,” Gavin continued, narrowing his eyes. “How have things been going around here?”
“How so?”
“Let me rephrase the question. How have things been going since Bryson Witner became the interim dean?”
At the mention of that name Jack stiffened.
“It's been…interesting,” he said, after a moment's hesitation.
Gavin nodded. “Go on.”
“To be honest, Dr. Gavin, I don’t know how much longer I can put up with it,” Jack admitted.
“Could you be more precise?”
“It's his arbitrary style of management.”
“Arbitrary? That sounds like a euphemism.”
“Can I give you an example?”
“Please.”
“Okay—I’d been holding open the post of assistant ED director until we could find the right person.”
“Of course. That’s only sensible.”
“Last month, Witner informs me the opening needs to be filled immediately, and he has just the candidate—Humphrey Atwood.”
“Hapless Humphrey? Ouch.”
“He would have been the last man on earth,” Jack agreed. “But it was a done deal.”
“That decision should have been your prerogative as director.”
“So I thought.”
Other voices echoed through the old lobby from up on the mezzanine, where a handful of people in white coats were walking in the direction of the Flexner Room. An orderly pushed the usual cart bearing pastries and coffee.
Jack looked back at Gavin. “Either you’re one of Witner’s cheerleaders, or he makes your life miserable,” he went on. “Frankly, I was shocked when he was elected as the interim dean over Dr. Zyman. How he got enough support, I don’t know. There was always something about him I couldn’t warm up to. He’s obviously brilliant, but he’s too…slippery.”
“How do you mean, Jack?”
“His personality differs depending on who he’s with. He’s like a chameleon. You can’t pin him down.”
Gavin seemed to consider this for a moment then slowly nodded.
“Jack, I should never have gone away on sabbatical. Part of this is my fault.”
“Listen, Dr. Gavin, after all you’ve done for this place, you deserved a sabbatical if anyone did. What worries me is that he may become the permanent dean.”
“Trust me, Jack, that’s far from a done deal. I still have plenty of influence here, and the search committee is not finished with their work yet. Let's go to the meeting. I could use a cup of coffee.”
Halfway up the staircase, Gavin paused, and Jack followed the direction of his gaze to the mural on the west wall.
“I can never look at that without smiling,” said the older man.
The old painting depicted a country doctor in a buggy being pulled down a dirt road by a white horse bearing a pair of clumsy-looking wings. The physician’s long hair and the tails of his frock coat flew out behind him. Looking down from the upper left corner, a gray-bearded god stood on a cloud holding a caduceus.
“We don’t know exactly who the artist was,” Gavin went on. “Probably one of the physicians on the original medical staff here around eighteen-seventy, but his ambitions exceeded his technical skills. The poor doctor looks terrified when he should be looking resolute, and Apollo seems like he’s about to yell, Whoa, Pegasus—you’re going to kill that boy!”
“You’re right,” said Jack, smiling.
“This place is full of ghosts for me. Forty-seven years ago, I came here to train in pathology, right after Korea. Over by that bay window, I proposed to my wife Betty when she was a nurse and I was still a resident.” He was quiet for a moment. “Since Colin died, and then Betty, this place is my family.”
Jack looked at the old physician and felt a surge of affection.
“I didn’t know you were in the Korean War, sir,” he said after another moment of silence.
“I never mentioned that?”
“No, sir.”
“Yes, and it was quite an experience. I was drafted right after my internship. That’s how I got this.” He touched a deep scar on the left side of his chin. “A shell landed next to our hospital tent.”
More voices were coming from down the corridor now.
“Jack, something very disturbing is happening at this medical center.” Gavin's voice lowered to a near-whisper. “The letter Les wrote me the day before he died contained some things about which I can say no more until I’ve done some research. In the meantime, I want you to promise me you won’t quit. Not yet. This is your home, too.”
Jack thought back to his first day of medical school at New Canterbury, when Dr. Gavin had given the welcoming lecture. He had talked about the glories and the hardships of a physician's life, the rewards and the toil, and his words—his very example—had made the journey seem utterly worthwhile.
“You’ve got my promise,” he said.
They began climbing again. As they neared the mezzanine, someone recognized Gavin and a hail went up. He was soon surrounded, and Jack let himself be swept along into the old conference room.
For the first time in weeks, he allowed himself a bit of optimism for the future.
III
Opportunity Beckons
The train headed north out of Pennsylvania Station in darkness, gliding through the stone-and-brick gorges of Manhattan and the Bronx. It crossed the Hudson River as the sun rose, picked up speed and entered a world of hills, forests and occasional small towns.
Zellie Andersen studied the countryside rolling by. For the first time since moving to New York City a decade ago, she was seeing the hinterlands of New York State, and she was struck by how quickly and profoundly the urban world vanished behind her. Though the trees were smaller and the barns and houses constructed for colder weather, she couldn’t help but see a resemblance to the Piedmont region of North Carolina, her home state; and she felt nostalgia for people and places she hadn’t seen in many years.
They’d already stopped at several stations, and the car was now half-empty, the seat all hers. She stretched, smoothed back her hair and returned to the correspondence she’d been working on.
As she bent over her notepad and began writing, a sudden tingle went down the back of her neck. She looked up. In the seat across the aisle sat a man in his late fifties or early sixties. He was leaning in her direction, and had a look on his face that indicated he’d just asked her a question and was waiting for a reply. She remembered his face from earlier that day when he’d smiled at her as they waited to board the train back in Manhattan.
“Beg pardon?” she said.
The man pulled back as a young girl passed between them, and then he repeated his question.
“Do you know what time we're supposed to get into Buffalo?”
She shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said.
“These things never run on time anyway,” he said, smiling. “I’m glad I brought a stack of magazines.”
It was obvious he was also looking for conversation, but she had never enjoyed small talk with strangers, and the truth was that conversation required a special effort. She went back to the letter she’d been writing.
Zellie had been partially deaf since the age of six, when an epidemic of meningococcal meningitis had swept through Fort Bragg, where her father was a helicopter test pilot. One of the first victims had been Zellie’s mother, who worked as a civilian nurse at the base hospital. Zellie had fallen ill just before her mother died.
Much of that time was thankfully a blur now. One of the memories that stayed with her, however, sticking out like a rock in a muddy river, was the day they opened the blinds and she saw her father standing there with his lips moving and no sound coming out. She'd thought he was trying to make her laugh.
The infection had damaged her auditory nerves. She could hear nothing with her left ear, and the right one had about twenty-five percent residual function. A hearing aid could do nothing to help the left ear, but when she wore one in the right ear she had about fifty percent of a normal person’s hearing ability. To converse normally, especially if a person spoke softly or rapidly, she needed face-to-face contact, for she had developed an excellent ability to read lips.
Being a good lip reader meant she was also an acute observer of facial expressions. There were times when she could predict what people were going to say before they opened their mouths, and friends joked about her powers of telepathy. Zellie—the BS detector.
She had taken the hearing aid out after boarding the train this morning, liking the way it added to a sense of privacy; and sitting here, she could perceive only a faint clicking of the wheels, though the line between hearing it and feeling the vibrations through the seat would have been hard to pinpoint.
She put the finishing touches on the letter and reread it.
Dear Amy,
I’m on the train now to a little place upstate called New Canterbury to do another la-di-dah feature story for a magazine. I can’t afford to turn anything down these days. Getting my little novel published long ago while I was still in college was too good to be true, and now I’m paying for it, I guess.
Still absolutely no luck getting a second one off the ground. I’ve made at least twenty starts and have taken a couple all the way to the second and third drafts, but I just can’t get them to come alive, if that makes any sense.
So, at the age of thirty-two, I know what it feels like to be a has-been, like the aging fashion model who makes her daily bread posing in underwear for newspapers. But who am I to complain? I’ve got as much happiness as anybody deserves and plenty of friends and I love living in Brooklyn, even if I don’t inhabit the higher literary circles. And I don’t have a man in my life since Derek and I split up two years ago to complicate things. Thank God we didn’t get married.
And I’m happy writing to my little sister, whom I can’t wait to see at Christmas time.
I love the train! Ever since I was sick way back then, I’ve been uncomfortable in small, closed-in places. So, a train is great—all these windows and the way you can get up and move around. That’s how I’ll be coming to see you in St. Augustine in December.
I was remembering the time you and Dad and I took the train to Atlanta to see Aunt Rita the year after Mom died. You’d just turned three, and I was seven. You weren't completely potty-trained yet, so Dad brought along some diapers. He stuffed them into that old blue canvas bag of his with the catfish on it, along with our sandwiches, and I recall being grossed out by that. But you didn’t need them. I proudly informed Aunt Rita you hadn't stunk up the train.
In any case, I’ll see you in a couple of months, kiddo. Write me. In the meantime, please know that it gives me great happiness to think of you and Todd with your two little babies, whom I’d love to kiss and hug right now.
All love,
Your big sis
Zellie
She folded the pages, addressed an envelope, sealed it and placed it inside her big leather satchel next to the several other letters she’d managed to finish since the train had left Manhattan. Zellie was proud to be among the dwindling number of people she knew who still wrote actual letters. She composed dozens every week, the briefest on postcards she bought in bulk from the Metropolitan Museum. It was easier than picking up the phone and gave her far more pleasure than email.
From a computer-obsessed friend named Esmond she’d heard ad nauseam about the Internet and how it revolutionized communications. He encouraged her to get hooked up so she could write instantaneous messages to friends anywhere on the planet. The Internet was great for research and sending in article drafts, but she wasn’t giving up on the postal service yet. In any case, she needed a new computer, and h
er income had shrunk again this year.
The topic of finances brought her agent to mind, and with a deep sigh, she reached into the satchel and brought out Muriel's latest communication and read it for the fifth time.
Muriel Gillman Literary Agency
19 Park Avenue, Penthouse North
New York, NY 10019
October 10, 1992
Dear Zellie,
It pains me to think we became cross with each other, or rather that you became cross with me, because I truly was not upset with you. As I’ve told you many times, Zel, you are like a daughter, so I have a right to scold you a little. You see, I care about more than just your career, please remember this! You have so much talent, Zellie, so much inside to offer the world.
I know you think this assignment from Coast-to-Coast Magazine is insipid, but you really shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you.
I am as sorry as anyone that your first novel was only a small success and that you can’t seem to finish another one. But lots of writers have been in the same boat. It’s just a matter of finding out what’s really inside you.
Editors tell me that you pull your punches, that you’re not writing out of your real self whether its fiction or nonfiction. You get by on sheer skill, but that’s only going to take you so far. Readers want the soul. They’re like damn cannibals in that way. That’s the difference between a novel selling 3670 copies and one that sells 367,000. But I KNOW you have it in you. I believe in you. The problem is that only you can fix it. And you will. Patience! That synopsis you showed me, the story based on your own life—that’s got real potential. I don’t know why you won’t follow up with it! Please try. Never give up!
Muriel meant well, but these pep talks were starting to sound like eulogies. Here lies an unsuccessful writer who never gave up. She folded the letter and stuffed it back then stared at her hands. She had always felt they were too large, and now they were starting to age. They were ringless, and the nails were cut short and unpolished. On the right middle finger by the last joint was a large callous from holding her pencils and pens. She rubbed it. It was firm and manifest, like a talisman, a testimonial to her ambition…and an eyesore.
Final Mercy Page 2
