Random Winds

by Belva Plain

  “You surely did. Oh my darling, why did you do this to yourself?”

  She sighed. He would want a lot of words, so many words, and in the end, they would say nothing. For how could she begin to explain it all?

  “Tell us at least who did it.”

  “No.”

  “Claire, it’s your obligation to tell. The man’s outside the law.”

  “I was, too, for going to him.”

  “That’s true, but he’s a butcher. He’s got to be stopped.”

  “No. He’s very skilled, I’m sure, but there’s always a risk. You know that. There’s a risk when you operate, too.”

  “I operate to save life, not to take it.”

  “Don’t be proud, Dad. And don’t make me feel more guilty than I already am.”

  “I don’t want to. But talk to me! Don’t make me feel as if I’m facing some sort of conspiracy between you and this—this nameless person.”

  “But it is a conspiracy. It has to be. It’s a conspiracy of trust,” she murmured. “I trusted him to help me and he trusted me not to talk.”

  In anguish, Martin cried, “He didn’t help you!”

  He took her hand. She felt the pressure of his hands on hers, although she had no strength to return it. Cool sunlight flickered peacefully over the walls and it pleased her to watch it.

  “It’s so good not to have things hurt inside,” she murmured.

  “Nothing hurts, Claire?”

  They could understand each other’s most elliptical remarks. She answered, “Something always will, I guess.”

  “You didn’t want to let him know, to call him back?”

  “No.” She spoke with pride. “He made his choice once, didn’t her?”

  “So did you,” Martin said quietly. He released her hand, got up and changed chairs. “I liked him in spite of myself. You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I hated the marriage. I couldn’t help hating the thought of it. So in a way I’m relieved it’s not going to be. And also, because you loved him, I’m guilty as hell over being relieved. It’s so damned complicated! I can’t unravel anything.”

  “Don’t try. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “We seem to do everything the hard way, you and I, with the best of intentions.”

  “I know.” She felt the smart of starting tears and turned her head away.

  “Dad? Let me sleep, please. Let me sleep now.”

  Jessie stood by the side of the bed. Her lipstick was smeared. She must have been in an awful rush to go out like that.

  “Well, Mama,” Claire said and remembered that she hadn’t said “Mama” since she had entered first grade.

  “So, Claire. You’ve messed things up a little, I see.”

  “I thought you were in Vermont.”

  “I was. Your father telephoned me there. He got the number from my office.”

  “He called you?”

  “Yes. I’ve been here every day.”

  “You’ve seen Dad, then?”

  “No. There isn’t any reason to see him, so I take care not to.”

  Like a child of separated parents, Claire had for just an instant a fleeting picture of Martin and Jessie standing together again; an unfounded, useless, silly hope, it was, the result, no doubt, of her own exhaustion.

  “Well, what do you think of me?” she demanded. “I’m waiting for your opinion.”

  Jessie regarded her. “What do you want me to tell you? That you’ve been wicked, or that you’ve been a fool? Or neither? Or both?”

  “Tell me whatever you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything. I’m just glad you’re alive. Other than that, I feel numb.”

  The nurse came in with a drink and a right-angled straw. “Lemonade for you. Drink it all, you need plenty of fluids. Can you manage?”

  “I’ll help her,” Jessie said.

  Claire made the introduction. “This is my mother, Miss McGrath.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Farrell, pleased to meet you,” the nurse said, careful not to look at Jessie.

  Jessie braced Claire’s head. There was surprising strength in her arms. It seemed to flow right down into Claire’s spine.

  “Finish it,” she commanded.

  When she had done so, Claire leaned back on the pillow. “Have they told you,” she asked, “that I may never be able to have a child after this?”

  Jessie closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face had sunk into sadness. “They’ve told me.”

  The room was still. The crash of a tray in the hall reverberated like an explosion.

  “What else could I have done?”

  “You could have had the baby,” Jessie said. It was more a question than a declaration.

  “Without a father? I had my own experience of that.”

  “You could have gone with Ned.”

  “I’m to be a doctor. I have a life as a doctor. I’m Martin Farrell’s daughter.”

  “I understand. Also you have your pride. I understand that, too.”

  Claire smiled faintly. “Yes, you would.”

  “I’m not sorry you didn’t marry him. I don’t have to tell you that. It would have been a miserable all-around situation—and not just for me.”

  “I’ve told you, that old business had nothing to do with us.”

  “So you say. But there’s no need to argue it anymore, is there? I’m only sorry it ended in the way it did for you.”

  “It’s crazy,” Claire said, very low, “that I’ve been trained to save lives, yet I took a life away.” And after a minute, she repeated, “What else could I have done?”

  “I can’t tell you. There’re just so many things I don’t understand. There’re just too many things I can’t solve, and this is one of them, and I never shall.”

  “Do you know how I feel this minute?”

  “Tell me.”

  “As if nothing I may do after this can ever matter very much, as if the world were empty.”

  “Empty? No, no.” Jessie shook her head so that the long gold earrings swayed like tassels. “It’s too full, Claire. Full of opposites and contradictions. There’s charity and hatred, there’s art and vandalism. There’s loving and not being loved. Oh my God, it’s so crowded with wanting things and fighting for them! And sometimes it’s sheer hell.” She sighed. Her eyes went vague. She seemed to be dreaming into the space above Claire’s bed, beyond the window and far out. Then abruptly she jerked her head back, crying cheerfully, “Empty, Claire? Never. Soon you’ll walk back into the world again and you’ll find out.”

  Chapter 30

  Judy was eight years old, and the first thing Martin had noticed about her was her curly hair, his favorite kind that springs between the fingers. She was not a pretty child, but more poignant than any prettiness was her bright humor. Or perhaps she only touched him so for the simple reason she was just eight and she was going to die.

  He had been keeping her alive—he and the hand of God—for eleven months. Sharply, distinctly, he could recall his grief when on the day of the first operation he and Leonard Max had opened her skull and discovered the gluey, spreading glioma multiforme. She had asked him whether he would fix her up so she could skate again. She was a very good skater, she said, and he could come and watch her some Saturday morning at the Rockefeller Center rink. Her parents had promised figure-skating lessons, but her left leg had been too weak this past winter. He had given her an evasive answer which could be interpreted as comfort and hope, but not too much of either.

  It was very hard to look into a child’s face and to parry her questions when you knew what was going on inside her head. Of course, she had not been on skates again: walking was difficult enough. The entire left side was going. He had left an opening in her skull, covered only by scalp, so that the growing tumor might have room to move outward instead of farther in upon the brain. Like seed in fertile earth, the tumor grew, bulging into a lump like a potato surrounded by a new growth of curls. In a f
ew weeks at most, they would have to operate again. And then one Sunday afternoon Leonard Max telephoned.

  “Martin? I’m at the hospital with Judy Wister. They called me from home for morphine, and of course I told them to bring her right in. The intracranial pressure’s shot up. We can’t wait till Monday.”

  “I’ll be right over. Get the O.R. ready and call Perry, will you?”

  “What if I can’t get him? It’s Sunday. He may not be home.”

  “Then get anyone you want but I always feel better with Perry for anaesthesia.”

  “Of course.”

  Martin hated this operation. When he came into the operating room, he knew everyone would see how much he hated having to do it to this child. He knew that he was not like most surgeons, who managed to keep a cool, professional dispassion. But it was not the way he was, never had been, and it was too late to change now.

  The child lay on the table under the lights. So quick, so small, with her little monkey-face; he could imagine her on skates, her toothpick legs under a whirling short skirt of yellow or red; could see beyond her to her home, an apartment in the more respectable reaches of the Bronx, where you pressed the buzzer to get in at the front door and then went through corridors that smelled of onions to the bedrooms where five children slept and where you would look past the courtyard into other people’s bedrooms.

  The parents were waiting now at the foot of the hall. They knew she was going to die long before skating time next winter. He hadn’t told them so, but they could understand what he had not told them. And he thought of them going back to that apartment without her, of how they would remember her flashing on her skates; he saw the father plodding back to the telephone company where he labored for the rent and the food and the shoes and the dentist. All this went through Martin’s head while he took the few steps from the door to the table where she waited for him.

  Leonard Max was ready. Martin wondered whether it had been a disappointment to Max that he had returned, able and well from a dark depression. Otherwise Max could have got the practice and hired an associate to be junior to him! Yet he might be doing Max a terrible injustice in thinking so. You never knew about people. Never again would he presume to understand the workings of the human mind, including his own; so delicate, subtle, secret and precious it was.

  Perry came in and took his place. It seemed to Martin that he was panting, as though he had been fetched in a hurry. But it was so good to have him there, he and Leonard and the familiar, competent, swift nurses.

  So he picked up the scalpel and began. He cut through the fine silk sutures that he himself had sewn in the scalp. Blood, as was to be expected, came spurting into the automatic sucker. He cauterized the surface vessels. Now farther, farther, knowing all the time that the thing was too deep for hope. How it had grown in these few months! Like weeds in a week-long spell of rain it had flourished, spreading roots and arms, branches and tentacles, and from each of these the finest, toughest fibers. Hopeless. Hopeless. Still he worked on, cutting away at the yellow, bulging brain and tumor, so interwoven now that they had become a single entity.

  Doggedly he cut. But why are you doing this? The answer is the same as the mountain climber’s famous reply: Because it is there. Until the last breath has left the body, you do whatever you know. Everything you have ever learned or practiced, you do. Given another few months of life, so the theory goes, who can say that some miraculous therapy may not suddenly be discovered, so that at the very last second, this child might be pulled back from the grave? So you work, even when you know it is too late for any theory or therapy to be applicable here.

  The room was unusually quiet Everyone remembered that this little girl had been here before. All knew that the most Martin could do this time was to remove as much more of the tumor as possible to relieve the pressure on the brain. Then he would close up the scalp and wait for the bulge to form again. Maybe once, or at most twice more, this would all be done again, and after that would come the end.

  At Martin’s elbow Perry’s eyes and freckled forehead turned copper under the lights. Like some priest of an ancient rite, Martin thought—queer thoughts he was having today—Perry stood beside the silvery metal cylinders of anaesthetizing gas and oxygen, listening to the stethoscope, monitoring the pulse, announcing, at regular intervals, the blood pressure. Occupied with his own exploration, Martin was still always alert to everything else around the table, from the nurses handing instruments and gauze to the gas bags expanding and contracting with the child’s indrawn and outgoing breath. Suddenly it seemed too long since Perry had last spoken.

  “Blood pressure,” Martin called.

  From the corner of his eye, he looked up. Perry was standing there with a kind of absentminded, dreaming look. For an instant Martin followed his gaze to the window and the sky, where evening crept.

  “Blood pressure, Perry!” he called sharply now. And at almost the same moment, he saw that the oozing blood from the wound he had been excavating was turning dark, turning blue.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he cried. “Oxygen! For Christ’s sake!”

  Perry leaped. His arm appeared to leap through the air, turning one cylinder up, the other one down. Oxygen purred with a soft, liquid rush: whish, whish. He looked up at Martin. Such a strange, helpless look! It crossed Martin’s mind: something’s the matter with him; his eyes are swimming.

  Then Perry said, “Erratic pulse.”

  “Adrenalin,” Martin commanded.

  “I don’t think I can get the pulse,” Perry said.

  “Oxygen,” Martin commanded.

  “I definitely can’t get the pulse,” Perry said. It sounded in Martin’s ears like pleading.

  “Cardiac arrest!”

  There was a swift, disciplined scurrying in the room. Someone jumped on the table and began to thump on the child’s chest.

  “Two amps bicarb!”

  “Let’s get the paddles.”

  “Open up the fluids!”

  “Open the intravenous line!”

  These low commands went back and forth; arms and hands reached back and forth. The needle of adrenalin pierced the heart; it seemed like hours and was, actually, minutes.

  “The EKG is flat,” Perry said, and then, finally, “It’s finished.”

  Someone was still working, working desperately on the chest.

  “No,” Leonard Max said, “it’s no use.” And he repeated, “It’s finished.”

  There was a tired silence until Max broke it again. “Perhaps it’s a mercy,” he said gently. “She hadn’t very long.”

  Martin didn’t answer. He had gone through it before and would go through it again; each time was a separate agony. And in a familiar gesture, he drew his gloves off and threw them on the floor.

  They went out into the hall to the waiting room where the second act was to be played, the act of notification. The three paced down the corridor abreast, Martin and Leonard and Perry. Martin wanted to ask, “What happened, Perry?” But then he wasn’t sure he ought to because there was a fuzz of confusion in his mind right now, and anyway, there was this to be got through, and he was exhausted.

  The mother went mad. She had been standing with her hand over her mouth as the three men approached. Possibly, he thought afterward, the news had been written in their eyes or their walk. And he knew he would always see her face out of a long line of such faces going back years and years. It was wide across the top like a cat’s, with a delicate pointed chin and round pale eyes. Her scream was the most terrible sound one could ever hear, worse than the cry of an animal being slaughtered or a woman in labor. Her husband and some other young man, a brother or brother-in-law, took her to a room. Nurses came running. Someone gave her a hypodermic. It was over.

  And Martin went home to have supper with his children, who had, as far as he knew, no alien things growing in their heads, and he was thankful for that.

  Later, in bed, he tried to reorder his thoughts. Had the child become cyanot
ic because of the surgical shock or had Perry in some way failed? He recalled that in the flurry he had sensed something strange about Perry. But then, perhaps it was only his imagining as a result of the flurry. Everything had happened too fast to remember the sequence of events. He often thought he’d make a bad witness to an accident It had been proven that three people could witness the same event and give three completely different reports of it. So his mind went spinning and rotating toward sleep.

  In the morning at the office Leonard said, “That was some rotten Sunday afternoon yesterday.”

  Martin, going over mail at his desk, had a sense of Leonard’s hovering halfway to the door, as if he were waiting to say something more.

  “Did you see Perry afterward?” Leonard asked.

  “Afterward?”

  “Yesterday, before you left.”

  Martin looked up. “No, I went straight home. Why?”

  “Well, there was something odd about him.”

  Martin waited.

  Leonard sat down. “I think—Jesus, I hate to say this—but I could swear he’d had a couple of drinks.”

  “You know what you’re saying. Leonard?”

  “I sure as hell do! I’m not saying it to anybody else, Martin, for God’s sake. I’m telling you. He was talking to one of the kid’s relatives, the uncle I think. The young guy with the parents. I saw him in the hall after I got dressed and he just—well, he was talking too loud and too much and—Well, you know that faint something you can detect, not drunk exactly, but—”

  Martin interrupted. “Did you notice anything in the O.R.?”

  “I only thought—well, I thought he wasn’t paying attention. The kid should have got more oxygen. He wasn’t monitoring.”

  For a long minute neither of them spoke. Martin tapped a pencil on the desk. Certain things came back to him more clearly now: Perry looking out of the window; the sky streaked rust and claret He felt the slow thud of his heart.

  “Yesterday was his anniversary, they were having a party at his house.”

  Perry was not a drinker, but at an anniversary party, surely he would have had a couple? “I just don’t know,” Martin said again.