by Belva Plain
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 so
ft 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?”
“Well, of course, you must know that people—that nurses—talk about doctors, especially about the young, unmarried ones.” She flushed. “But they say good things about you! That you’re awfully gentle with your patients and really care, that even when you’re cranky with the nurses sometimes, you’re sorry afterward. They all like you.”
“That’s not what you meant before, when we were talking about divorce.”
She said timidly, “They think you must be a chaser because you’re not married. But I didn’t think you were.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I felt a quietness in you. And maybe some sadness.”
It isn’t sensible to talk about your private life, especially where your work is: a snobbish concept, maybe, but of proven practicality all the same. And even as he was thinking so, Martin began to speak.
It was almost as though someone else were talking and he were listening. Slowly and thoughtfully, he heard himself say aloud the names of people and places which he had scarcely used since they had passed out of his life. Menton. Mary. Jessie. Lamb House. Claire.
The night wind blew hard there on the fourteenth floor, so that Hazel drew the sweater closer. Her eyes never left his face.
“That’s the whole story?” she asked when he had finished.
“The whole story.”
“And it’s over between Mary and you?”
“Yes,” he said harshly.
He was angry with himself. Why had he spilled everything out to a stranger? All day he had been feeling a foggy sadness, and now, having been on his feet almost twenty-four hours, he had simply been carried away by fatigue. Damn, he ought to have gone home to sleep instead of sitting here pouring his heart out! He stood up. It was five o’clock. A milky light had risen at the windows.
“I’d better get home to shave and change before I go to work. By the way, when do you go back on duty?”
“At seven tonight.”
“Then this was your time to sleep, and I’ve kept you up.”
“I wouldn’t have stayed if I hadn’t wanted to.” She touched his arm. “I just thought—you’re probably sorry you told me so much. You’re worried I’ll talk about it all over the place. But I never will. You can trust me.”
He looked down into a face so gentle that it pained him: it was like looking at a wound. One saw such faces on lonesome children, on certain rare old men and sometimes on women of radiant goodness.
“Yes,” he said, “I trust you.”
Eastman moved back from the respirator, stepping carefully between the oxygen tank and the tubing. In the transparent box which had been trundled over the bed, Vicky Moser lay unmoving, except for the slight rise and fall of her chest. He beckoned to Martin and they went out to the corridor.
“For the sake of my blood pressure, I had to wait a whole day before I could talk to you, Farrell,” he began.
“I don’t understand!”
“You had no right to take the knife to Vicky Moser!” Eastman’s words were precisely separated, cut apart, as if he were teaching English to a foreigner. “You had no authority. What made you think you had?”
Martin was dumbfounded. “But you were out of town! And I am your associate!”
“You made no real effort to reach me. As a matter of fact, I had gone to my sister’s house in Westchester before starting for Maine in the morning. I could have been back here in little more than an hour.”
“How, in all fairness, could I have known that?”
“Well, in all fairness, perhaps you couldn’t. Certainly, though, you could have called some other chief, couldn’t you?”
“Dr. Florio and Dr. Samson were called and couldn’t be reached.”
“What about Shirer, then? These are prominent people, Farrell. Moser’s a trustee. You don’t fool around with people like Moser. I shouldn’t have to tell you that, for God’s sake.”
&nbs
p; Anger began to boil up in Martin, but he answered coolly. “In the first place, sir, I don’t care a damn about prominence. In the second place, I didn’t recommend Dr. Shirer because I consider myself a better surgeon than he is.”
“What? Shirer has been on staff here for thirty years! And you compare yourself with him?”
“He’s been doing mediocre work for thirty years, Dr. Eastman.”
“Oh, I suppose you consider my work mediocre, too?”
“Of course I don’t. But there are some procedures I can do as well as you can, and this was one of them.”
“It was, was it?”
“Yes, I knew I could do it. I wouldn’t have undertaken it otherwise.”
“I call that arrogant. I don’t know what you call it.”
“I call it confident.”
Eastman’s cheeks reddened. “I’ll want to talk about that again, Farrell. I’m not sure you and I can get along in the future unless certain things are clarified.”
In Martin the anger now boiled over. He had done a thorough job! If it didn’t work out, if the girl should die or should live and merely vegetate, why then, it would have happened anyway! It would have been “fated,” “ordained,” whatever that meant. I truly and honestly know my limitations, he thought.
And he said, with a calmness that surprised himself, “I don’t think we will get along, Dr. Eastman, unless you give me the respect and freedom I deserve.”
For a second Eastman stared at him; then, without replying, he turned about and almost ran down the hall.
For three days they poured glucose and oxygen into Vicky Moser. She was now Eastman’s patient; Martin had been removed from the case. He wondered what was being whispered about the hospital. No doubt the news had filtered down to the newest student nurse on the floor. Nevertheless, he went in to look at Vicky. Hazel Janos was there one evening, but she made no comment, only watched while Martin pulled Vicky’s eyelids back and found no change. The pupils were still enlarged and made no move under the pinpoint shaft of his pencil-light.
On the fourth day came momentary hope when normal breathing resumed, and she was taken out of the respirator. But still she lay inert, unresponsive to touch or light or the sound of voices.
